IoT Vrooms Into F1 and NASCAR

I recently spoke with Todd Mory, an engineering-jack-of-all-trades and founder of Techmor. Todd has always been fascinated by fast-wheeled things, turning his childhood passion into a fruitful career in high-performance vehicle design. In other words, he builds things that go fast. I asked him how the Internet of Things has played into the evolution of his company, and about the sensors he builds. Here’s what he had to share:

Tell us a little bit about yourself:

As a kid, I was always riding around on skateboards, bikes, go-karts; I loved anything on wheels. In school, I studied physics and mechanical engineering, participating in programs like Formula SAE. So I suppose I was destined for high-performance automotive design from the very beginning. I spent decades working for the likes of Ford and Toyota, designing vehicles to compete in Formula 1, NASCAR, and more.

In 2008, I decided to go out on my own and started Techmor. I started helping other racing teams by building new sensors and systems for high-performance testing. Our clients use data from our cutting edge sensor systems to make strategic design decisions, all in hopes to get a competitive advantage over the rest of the field. 

So then how did you get into the Internet of Things? 

Gone are the days when mechanical engineering was purely mechanical. There’s electrical powering, software control, communications, and more. Right after I had graduated and started out at Ford, I realized that, as a mechanical engineer, if I hung around the electrical engineers I could learn just enough to become an expert in embedded design. Nowadays, I do all kinds of design work, including mechanical design, electrical design, coding, and app development.

At what point did Silicon Labs come into the picture?

Oh man, this might make me sound old, but I remember a company called Cygnal. They built 8-bit chips and started adding peripherals - like the CAN bus - which is an industry standard in automotive design. These chips were really innovative in my early days. Silicon Labs bought Cygnal and the innovations just kept coming.

Today, I can acquire sensor data through a CAN bus, do a little bit of onboard processing on a 32-bit MCU, and I can use a Digi XBee radio or Bluetooth communication to send signals to a bridge or mobile device. So we’ve come a long way from the analog world.

I’ve continued using Silicon Labs products because they always seemed to keep the pace with the microcontroller industry. I remember when things like wireless communication weren’t possible and Silicon Labs was one of the first to provide chips that could do that. And it always seemed like its new chips would have 10x the processing power than its predecessors.

You also have to understand that my industry has some pretty tough requirements on embedded processing. It’s not just about the performance, it’s about the ruggedness. These chips need to operate in some pretty tough conditions. Imagine a pizza oven on a jack hammer. These chips get close to really hot areas, experiencing extreme vibrations and torque up to 8,000 horsepower.

Keep in mind, we use a lot of other technology from other chip manufacturers in our designs too. But the easiest chip to use is the one you know best. The portability of code and existing designs across their product family often saves us a lot of development time. And in cases where we don’t already have existing code or programs ourselves, Silicon Labs usually has its own example programs, so we are rarely ever starting from scratch.

So let’s hear about some of the cool stuff you are working on:

One of our products calculates exact height and width dimensions of a vehicle. Knowing the exact height of every corner of your physical car is a strategic advantage when you are determining how to take corners and navigate tracks. In the past, you’d have to use tape measures, crawl under the car, factor in a margin of error, and more. But we made it simple by using magnets and lasers. You stick a couple of our sensors on the car by magnet. They point lasers at each other to take the dimensions and they communicate these dimensions back to your android device.

Specifically, we have a Silicon Labs chip that interfaces with our laser sensor. It converts the analog voltage to a radio signal. We can put this radio to sleep for a matter of milliseconds to help save battery life. These long range radio signals are sent to a bridge, where they are converted to Bluetooth and ultimately sent to the user interface Android device. 

What’s the next milestone on your horizon?

Basically, after figuring out all this wireless stuff, IoT, and how to send packets of information, we now have a repeatable framework: you take a reading, send to tablet, and this tablet is connected to the internet.

We’ve called this platform “LINC.” It’s our home brewed framework to make a small message and store it in a database. For our customers, it’s less about the Internet of Things and more about the Internet of Tools. They now have record of all of these measurements, every measurement they’ve ever taken. And many of the teams have multiple cars, so they can start consolidating information together. There’s no telling how racing can evolve when they have access to every data point they’ve ever taken. 

In your opinion, what does the future of IoT look like?

In my mind, as the price of these chips and connectivity gets lower and lower, I don't think we'll continue to call these IoT devices. They will just be known as devices.