Blecon is a Cambridge (UK)-based company. The company enables physical products to communicate with cloud applications using Bluetooth Low Energy.
Their recent industry awards and successful fundraising from established investors demonstrate the potential of this young startup.
I met Donatien Garnier at last November's Electronica event in Munich.
He is the principal engineer working on Blecon's firmware. In addition to being a very approachable person, he is also technically strong.
I am quite familiar with the challenges of such solutions. In one of my projects for a customer, I worked on a similar project to what Blecon offers. I know firsthand that developing this in-house can take many many months!
Here is a video by Donatien presenting Blecon's solution with the recently released nRF54L series from Nordic Semiconductor.
After our talk, Donatien gave me this "community" kit...
... So the technical specification differs quite a lot from the Blecon commercial product, but I still wanted to test it!
They kept the packaging minimal, but at least you could argue it's environmentally friendly. And do you really need more packaging for such a kit?
It was easy to install. The product follows the SPI (Shoe Protocol Interface) specification. Integrating the Blecon kit into my test bench went smoothly.
The image speaks for itself. The two modules don't pair with each other, but at least they're complementary!
One advantage of non-pairing is that you can switch one of the modules with any other alternative solution.
I used to live in Cambridge (UK), not far from the Blecon office. Though I was on the other side of Cambridge, it's a small city, so distances aren't vast. I'm familiar with the surrounding area. The highest point is Gog Magog Hill, at around 50 meters. In contrast, just a few kilometers from my current office, I have Olympia Park with several steep hills. Here, I can easily climb to 300 meters of elevation. When field testing, I always avoid shortcuts that forces the bench to be stressed.
Cloud integration is a key part of Blecon's value proposition. Blecon community kit clouds are standards but they fit quite well into a real cloud environment.
My test has significant resource constraints. I cannot risk adding a kit that would consume excessive energy. The Blecon community kit did not consume more energy than my usual kit. In fact, it consumed very little energy.
Security, both cyber and physical, is paramount in IoT devices. After subjecting the Blecon device to a stress test, I observed no damage to the test bench.
In conclusion, this kit delivers on its promise. Building it from scratch would have taken months. While alternative solutions exist, but their offers require pairing and no cloud integration.
