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Sensors
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- Wireless Bridges
  Maxbotix and Honeywell
- Wireless Proximity Sensors
  Door/Window, Dry Contact and Ultrasonic Tank Level
- Wireless Temperature Sensors
  Measure Air Temperatures and Humidity Levels with LoRaWAN Sensors
- Wireless Push Buttons
  Single and dual buttons
- Wireless Movement Sensors
  Tilt, Acceleration, and Motion
- Wireless Liquid Sensors
  Water Leak Probes and Ropes
- Wireless Air Sensors
  Air temp and humidity
- Wireless Industrial Sensors
  4-20mA current loop and voltage
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- Custom Wireless Sensor Design
- LoRaWAN System Design
- IoT Data-as-a-Service
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Custom Wireless Sensor Design

Many sensor applications require customization, particularly those intended for high volume use

RAPID CUSTOM SENSOR DESIGN

The original design work for Radio Bridge products has been performed in-house including the electronics, firmware, RF circuits, antennas, cloud software, etc. This allows our team to very quickly and efficiently develop wireless sensors according to custom needs.

Customers often tell us they like our standard sensor X, but they also need it to do A, B, and C. Often the prototype can go out in just a few weeks if not days, depending on the level of complexity.

Combining sensor types into one device
Making a small behavioral change in the device firmware
Custom form factor for hardware to fit inside customer’s enclosure
Adding a new sensor type

All Radio Bridge designs are “modular” meaning we can mix and match sensor types quickly to accelerate the development process.

The engineering team at Radio Bridge has many years of experience developing a variety of sensor types, and just because something isn’t listed on the website doesn’t mean it can’t be added fairly easily. In fact, we have a number of sensor types that have already been prototyped and can be leveraged into a full product design if needed.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR LORAWAN SENSOR DESIGN

Aside from the RF and other wireless considerations discussed in the next section, development of LoRaWAN devices and other LoRaWAN design services requires extensive industry experience. There are freely available code bases and reference designs for LoRaWAN end devices, however, new users find that there are many subtleties of this protocol that will cause reliability issues in the field if they are not addressed up front.

A FEW EXAMPLES MAY INCLUDE:

How do you handle the case where harmonics of your uplink signal transfer to nearby (but incorrect) wireless channels?
How do you recover if the network server sends your device an incorrect channel mask?
How do you handle the case where the sub-band of the gateway / network server changes randomly in the field?
How do you handle the case where the downlink configuration is corrupted and the device attempts to connect to the LoRaWAN network in an unknown state?

Examples of custom sensors and original design work

These considerations are numerous, and Radio Bridge has worked through all of these over the years. By being early adopters of LoRaWAN technology and obtaining field testing time across all major gateway vendors, network servers, regional frequency bands, and other variables, we can ensure that the core IP of Radio Bridge sensors will be rugged and reliable.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR RF CIRCUIT DESIGN AND WIRELESS SENSORS

Radio Frequency (RF) circuit design for wireless sensors requires knowledge and experience in the wireless domain. Many engineers mistakenly believe that they can simply follow a reference design and then later find that their RF circuit performs very poorly or not at all. Understanding the physical characteristics of the medium or materials that the circuit is design on, the environment, the enclosure, ground planes, antennas, etc all factor into the efficiency of the radio and subsequent certification of the product. Knowledge of FCC and other certification standards is critical as is the equipment needed to properly tune and test your circuit prior to entering a certification lab.

RADIO BRIDGE HAS EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE IN RF CIRCUIT DESIGN:

RF tuning
Impedance matching
Antenna selection and/or design
PCB materials
Controlled impedance layout
Sub-Ghz experience in the 300MHz – 900MHz bands

Pricing and Next Steps

For a combined device (multiple sensor types in one), we typically recommend using multiple devices from our standard product portfolio for initial testing, and then a commitment on MOQ (minimum order quantity) will often be sufficient for us to move forward with the combined device design.

Minor changes to the firmware are often fairly simple, and again, a small commitment for a minimum order quantity is often all that is required. This may include custom payload structures, custom data conversions, custom reporting requirements, or countless other tweaks necessary for seamless integration into the end customer’s system.

Modifying the PCB hardware can also be a straightforward task, however there may be additional costs for prototyping, test fixture development, FCC certification, etc. In this case there will usually be a small NRE (non-recurring engineering cost) to cover these expenses.

FOR MOST CUSTOM SENSOR DESIGNS, YOU WILL BE GIVEN A UNIQUE PART NUMBER THAT YOU CAN REFERENCE FOR CONVENIENT VOLUME PURCHASING. CONTACT OUR SALES TEAM TO DISCUSS YOUR REQUIREMENTS AND RECEIVE A
CUSTOM QUOTE.

Fill out our online form or email us at: sales@radiobridge.com