Deploying Wiliot's Pixels for Technical Interview

Introduction

Wiliot is a fascinating technology that brings everyday objects from the physical world into the digital space. Wiliot's Pixels are tiny, battery-free, and wireless sticker tags that can be attached to an object to track various metrics associated with and around it. It provides intelligence to physical objects including packages, beverages, medicine, clothing, and more.

These pixels have antena that harvest energy from radio waves to power themselves, and with the help me embedded thumb sized processors, they can communicate with other devices, and send data to the cloud for further processing.

Task for the technical interview

I was asked to deploy six Wiliot Pixels on a box containing various materials (metals, plastics, liquids, etc.)

I successfully deployed the pixels by the following steps executed in the given order:

1. I created a new project on the Wiliot Cloud and named it Wiliot Technical Interview.
2. I placed two pixels on three boxes containing various materials. and scanned the barcode on the pixels to register them as assets on the Wiliot Cloud. After registering the pixels, I was able to see them on the Wiliot Cloud dashboard as an Assets.
3. After that booted a bridge device and connected it to the Wiliot Cloud. The bridge device is a small device that connects to the Wiliot Cloud and acts as a gateway for the pixels to send data to the cloud. Another important function of the bridge device is to provide power to the pixels through the Radio Frequency waves.
4. Once the bridges were booted up and connected, the pixels were able to harvest energy from the device and push its metrics readings like temperature, humidity, pressure, etc. to the cloud. I was able to confirm this by checking the metrics on the Wiliot Cloud dashboard.
5. Followed by that, I created a Location on the Wiliot Cloud dashboard and named it Wiliot Technical Interview Zone. I then added the three boxes containing the pixels to the Zone, partitioning them into multiple zones. A Location is a point of interest that can be further segmented into different zones.
6. After associating each bridge to the zones, I triggered a location change event by moving the boxes to different corners of the room. I waves were able to see the location change events on the Wiliot Cloud dashboard.

Conclusion

This was a very interesting task. Not only I enjoyed deploying the pixels, but I also learned about the technology behind it, and the challenges that Field technicians face while deploying them. For me, the most challenging part was to get the orientation of the bridges relative to the pixels right.