Hanhaa is a small London based IoT startup with a big mission: to enable businesses to monitor their global shipments at massive scale – meaning, tens of thousands of parcels – and make detailed information more easily accessible and cost-effective. Where was the parcel? Was it within the allowable temperature range? Had it got wet? Had it been tipped, dropped, or opened?
What’s more, Azhar wanted to offer his product as a service to make it more operationally feasible for a broad range of customers. “By offering (our product) ParceLive as a tracking service, our customers can stay focused on using their IoT data to improve their business without worrying about the up-front logistics and expense,” he said.
“Customers won’t need to buy the trackers, or charge them, or test them, or ship them around the world. We look after all of that while providing near real-time data about their parcels.”
This startup founder’s promising vision hinged on one small, yet surprisingly complex, piece of technology: the prototype’s chip antenna.
The problem
At first glance, the ParceLive device sounded straightforward: it was based on individual pieces of proven technology, from GPS and other sensors to the wireless communication equipment.
“It was when we started combining these different capabilities that things quickly become more complex—especially the antennae. A small tweak to one part of the design had a big impact elsewhere,” Azhar said. The product simply wasn’t meeting the requirements.
The MCU architecture was not performing at the required levels, the battery life was too short for international tracking and the existing chip antenna would not allow ParceLive to track with the granularity required for the product to reach its full potential in the market.
So, Azhar decided to find a specialist partner to bring his vision to market.
A new 3.30 minute video case-study outlines how Avnet helped Hanhaa to identify and overcome key design challenges in order to get its smart parcel-tracking solution to market in less than 3 years.
