September 26, 2022

An Interview with Ray Ozzie (Blues Wireless)

1 hour 16 minutes

Welcome Ray Ozzie, founder and CEO of Blues Wireless!

Chris had a Notecard / Notecarrier in front of him from a training he attended.

Blues describes the Notecard as a "data pump".

Ray first encountered the cellular IoT space with the Safecast project, which started in March 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Former guests Akiba and Bunnie also worked on the Safecast project.

The earliest versions of monitoring were Geiger + GPS + cellular. Sometimes they collected data onto SD cards when cellular wasn't available.

When the towers were available, it was 3G. Early prototyping was with Adafruit Fona 3G modules and Voltaic panels. Later prototypes included LoRa networks.

There were software solutions involved using Balena.io (formerly Resin.io)

Solarcast boxes

PSM (power save mode)

PTCRB certification

Craig Mundie

Ray had formerly worked at Microsoft, where he took over as Chief Software Architect when Bill Gates stepped down to work on his foundation.

Ray also worked at places like

Data General

Software Arts

Iris Associates

Groove Networks (the acquisition of which brought Ray to Microsoft)

Ray's early days were programming on TRS80s and using Intel 8080s to help Physics grad students do their experiements.

Ray has a range of huge software projects he's worked on

Visicalc

Lotus123

Lotus Symphony

Lotus Notes

Competition in the 90s

Chris is amazed at hearing about how early software was built, which reminded him of the Xerox Parc book discussed on the show previously.

Ray referenced this "org chart for Microsoft" with guns pointing at one another. (found here)

300 to 2400 bps upgrades was a big deal!

Ray on working on tech in the 'good old days': "You knew where it was going but it took so much longer to get there"

The Blues Notecard is built on top of the STM32L4R5, which has 640K RAM, and 2 MB Flash. It felt familiar to Ray because of his early programming days on similarly constrained computers.

Drawing people into orbit to increase impact

Ray is a Computer History Museum fellow as of 2021. Tributes from Bill Gates and Mark Cuban. Ray will be helping to induct Don Bitzer for his work on PLATO.

Storage Tube

Blues Wireless was Ray's solution to the problems of cellular IoT

Developing connectivity into products

PIC32 talking to cellular

Ray gives an example of how an engineer might retrofit an older product with a Blues Notecard

Dev.blues.io is the hub for people building with Blues. It has links to the Notehub, which is how you interact with your data coming back to Blues.

Uri / Wokwi episode

"we dont' provide the glass"

A cellular Notecard is $50 for hardware, 10 years of cellular data (500 MB), plus consumption credits on the Blues Wireless Notehub. Most people sending back data won't go over limits unless they're trying to send a lot of data.

Powered applications can save on session overhead by staying connected. Also applications can queue "notes" (data packets) and then send all of them at once to cut down on the need for multiple sessions to the cell tower. The data will synchronize to Notefiles (database).

Chris asked for Ray's predictions for 5-10 years out, since Ray has been very successful in the many parts of his career. Ray wants to get 10s of billions devices and thinks this will enable a lot of new things.

Find Ray online!

@rozzie on twitter

Ray's LinkedIn

Check out the main site at blues.io and check out the developer portal at dev.blues.io. Ray recommended picking up a kit to get started.

...more

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By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

4.9

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