Simplewire is a young but fast growing hardware startup, trying to solve a problem as old as electricity itself. As you might know, all buildings contain a myriad of electrical installations, which must be marked according to their point of origin. The process is called marking. Today, it is done manually with thousands and thousands of labels on wires, sockets, lamp sockets and junction boxes. Marking costs an enormous amount of labor time in planning and execution, and is virtually impossible to do correctly, as human error is inevitable. That leads to poor marking, which is a huge concern for building owners.
Simplewire is a digital system that's installed at the switchboard. ASK modulated signals are transmitted on the wires, and can be picked up wirelessly by our reader device. Doing it the old way, with labels, would have taken months and months to complete, and even longer in old buildings, if at all possible. With Simplewire, a whole building's electrical installation can be mapped 100% correctly, in less than an hour, and with no needed maintenance.
We have 3 devices. A Controller for each switchboard, which controls an amount of Routers (one for each breaker), and a Reader, which the building's managers and electricians have, that's used to read the wireless signals from the wires.
We use an MCU to modulate a bitstream which contains the ID of each Router, which is transmitted on the wire. An analog front-end demodulates the signal into a bitstream, which is resampled with a MCU, so the ID can be unpacked and presented to the user.
There's not much to it - we build hardware, nothing else. We design the analog electronics ourselves, in our electronics lab, before having them built by our PCB fabrication. We write all the code for our MCUs and we build and test and build and test and build and test until it works.