TreeTalk at Maker Faire Roma 2018 – European Edition

TreeTalk has demonstrated the working prototypes of devices, software and cloud system at Maker Faire Roma 2018 – European Edition.

TreeTalk became the finalist of the Call4Makers competition in the Innovative Projects category and presented its promising products at the Regione Lazio stand. It is a great honor for us to represent this Italian region at such a major international event.

Maker Faire is the Greatest Show on Earth in the field of invention and creativity. And Maker Faire Rome is the world’s largest Maker Faire exhibition after the “Bay Area” and “New York” in the US. Over 100,000 people participated at the biggest European innovation event in 2018.

It was an amazing 3-day event, transmitting its energy to visitors and participants. Existing companies and promising projects in various fields, such as electronics and prototyping, robotics, space, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality were presented at dozens of thematic sites of the Nuova Fiera di Roma exhibition center.

Universities, as well as business incubators and Active Spaces (Spazio Attivo) – innovative creative platforms of Lazio Innova, represented their projects. A special place was occupied by master classes and Science Show for young people and children. And, of course, in a country where the art has long become an integral part of everyday life, particular attention was attracted by the places where art and modern high technologies together created new interesting forms.

The attention of visitors was attracted by the tireless iron (literally) rock musicians of the One Love Machine Band, playing in the open air. Amazing products, decorations, clothes and art objects from traditional materials (wood, metal, ceramics, and fabrics), but created using digital technologies, were presented.

In addition to the entertainment program, the attention of specialists was attracted by high-tech solutions in the field of Industry and Business 4.0, revolutionary solutions for the retail, agriculture, food industry, and waste processing.

It is worth saying a little about the site where the exhibition was held.
Fiera Roma was opened in April 2006 and is one of the largest and most prestigious exhibition poles in Europe. This is a great architectural work, designed by the architect Tommaso Valle, and this is an excellent futuristic business center. The center is powered by the largest thin-film solar system in Italy, covering about 38,000 square meters of the pavilion roofs. The system generates 1.8 million kWh of clean energy per year.

In addition, Fiera Roma is a center for international trade and communications. Rome is not only a world-famous tourist destination but also a very important business center, strategically located in the midst of economic flows between north and south Italy and Europe. It is a bridge between old and new markets, equipped with modern and functional structures. The exhibition center is part of a multifunctional retail and office district with an area of more than 390,000 square meters.

Fiera di Roma is situated in a strategic location and is served by an excellent transport network. In addition to roads with convenient parking and interchanges, the complex has its own suburban railway platform (2 stops from the Fiumicino international airport or several stops from the center of Rome). At the time of the Maker Faire exhibition, the Italian railways not only increased the number of trains but also organized an information point on the platform with multilingual staff helping visitors to buy tickets and understand the routes.

TreeTalk presented its promising developments at the exhibition. Those are the real-time voice communication devices: the prototype of the car voice communicator “The Terminal One” and the prototype of the stationary communicator “TreeTalk Intercom“. Also were demonstrated: a prototype of a user web interface for managing devices and their groups (TreeTalk Web Panel) and a prototype program for the PC TreeTalk Dispatcher, which combines the functionality of personnel task management and instant communication with a specific employee (selective call) or with the whole team (group call).

We are grateful to the jury of the Call4Makers contest for the high appreciation of our developments and the opportunity provided. Thanks to participation in the exhibition, we were able to acquaint many people with our developments and get extremely useful feedback that will allow us to improve our prospective products.

TreeTalk: The Terminal One – Field Tests 2018. Summer. Hot Summer.

TreeTalk Terminal
TreeTalk Terminal

Moving to the other city to the other country and is very time consuming. And, of course, is exciting. Especially if “the other city” is the Eternal City. Any movement is also distracting, but we are strong 🙂 So, despite the traditional Italian vacation time, we are trying to work. August is hot this year, and people run to the seaside. But we are already here and ready to take full advantage of the ardent heat.

If you can remember, once upon a time, we tested our very first prototype in the really harsh conditions of Siberian winter. Now we have reincarnMeteoStation_48ation number 3 of that prototype, and it’s time to trial it under the Southern sun. The conditions appear harsh enough, too, but in the opposite sense. The terminal was subject to temperature extremes up to +55 Celsius (131 Fahrenheit). The temperature inside the black metallic enclosure was 10-20 degrees more. During the test time, the built-in audit system recorded the slightest failures in the network connection, in the electronics and embedded firmware.

We have got a lot of data, most of which we still have to process, but we have first interesting results.

Spoiler: most of the tests completed successfully, clearly confirming the advantages of the TreeTalk terminal over conventional and trunked radios in the reliability and quality of the voice and in the convenience of handling.

Contrary to expectations, the extreme heat itself did not effect electronics much. But we could mark, thanks to specific environments, two peculiarities.

First one is an unstable data transfer speed of the local mobile carrier. Despite the fact that the signal almost did not disappear anywhere at all, the real data transfer speed varied in the wider range, then we use to see earlier, and the frequency switched from 3g to 4g and back more often. Perhaps, this effect is tied to uneven distribution of tourists (and their smart phones). Fortunately, our specially developed protocol, and speech-compression technology was made for working in low-speed second-generation networks. So, “LTE tourist challenge” was not a problem for our device.

RomeAlso, we found, that stability of geo-positioning was not as good as always in the narrow streets and small squares of the old Rome center. Sometimes, the majority of satellites became invisible to the GPS antenna, and precision of geo-positioning deteriorated. It seems to me, we finally unraveled the reason for the mysterious disappearances and quantum leaps of Roman buses on the maps of transport applications 🙂

Quite seriously, we anticipated this issue and evident solution will be to try using the geo-positioning chips that have real-time multi-system tuner, instead of a multi – system tuner, working in the switching mode. Perhaps, we should also slightly tune the predictive algorithm in order to make it more intelligent in the such cases. All these improvements will be done in the next version of the hardware. We hope that the next version of the terminal will be even more robust.

 

TreeTalk is moving to Rome!

Rome

Great news!
As you could see in our Twitter blog, in the end of 2017 our startup TreeTalk was selected for the Italia Startup Visa program by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, and finally we are in the Eternal City!

Somebody could ask “Why Italy? Your startup is not about agrifood, hospitality, what else Italy famous for… Why not Silicon Valley or, maybe, Singapore?”

We have the short answer – because we love Italy!

And we have a long answer – do you know that Italian Republic is one of the European manufacturing leaders? That it is, at the same time, a big market itself and a part of the huge border-less European market, which is larger than US market? Do you know that EU has trade agreements with Canada and Japan, to name a few?

On the other hand, TreeTalk is moving closer and closer to start of production. And our B2B products can find their niche it the agrifood, hospitality, transportation – wherever the professionals need reliable, convenient real-time voice communications. That’s why we trust in this mutually profitable and long-term union.