A clever piece of South Australian technology has the potential to change the way we use, manage and monitor all manner of everyday devices in the home or workplace. In fact, John Schulz is so confident about the international significance of the new “device browser” that he can foresee the day it will be as important and accepted a part of normal life as a web browser.
The idea was born during a brainstorming session involving Schulz and his friend, colleague and now co-founder of Adelaide-based company Xped, Chris Wood. “The question that emerged … was: ‘could a device teach the controller what its functions and capabilities are?’” he said. “If you could answer that question, then it was not necessary to design a system for every existing product and all the applications to come.”
Schultz, Wood and Phil Carrig then set out to find the answer. Four years and more than 100,000 lines of software code later, Xped has a chip that can be placed in any device and will translate the product’s specifications and functions into a language that an electronic controller can understand. The gains in efficiency and productivity are potentially enormous, when you consider this technology applied to a vast range of home, leisure, industrial, commercial and agricultural applications.
Schultz said the challenge in connecting devices was “how to create a standardised interface for devices that have not been invented yet”. “There were three of us brain-storming this at the time and someone came up with the idea – what if the device described itself to the controllers; what if it just taught the controller how it should operate? That was the genesis of our device browser – we decided to build a system that allows the device you want to interact with to describe itself to the controller. We now have a platform which allows people to design a new generation of devices, which is a much simpler process than they have ever had before. It’s a much leaner and nimbler process that means product developers do not have to conform to a consortium’s specifications and standards.”
It’s not just Schultz and his team who are excited. People who have analysed the technology use expressions such as “revolutionary” to describe what they are seeing. “It’s the equivalent of going from cutting ice blocks in an ice field to building an ice factory,” Schultz said. “It’s a disruptive, revolutionary step, and our technology has been likened to that.”
While Xped looks for partners to help commercialise its idea, it is already attracting attention and winning awards. A number of local companies, including a supplier to a large air-conditioning company and an industrial moisture metering company, are incorporating Xped’s technology into their products and an MOU has just been signed with a Singaporean company with a big presence in temperature sensors. Xped is also currently shipping 250 units of its ADRC module to a group of developers, ranging from hobbyists to universities and corporates, who use a platform called Arduino – described by Schultz as “the Lego of electronics” – to build electronic devices.