It’s really easy to build a product, but building the right product is hard. We are constantly looking at technology tailwinds, synthesising customer needs, tinkering and iterating with a singular objective: to build the best products to make physical operations safer, more efficient and sustainable. 

Recently, we heard one message from customers loud and clear: organisations have difficulty tracking and managing small, mission-critical equipment that, when lost, misplaced or stolen, can cause significant time and financial losses. Whether it was a field services company struggling to find the right camera equipment to inspect a pipeline or a construction firm unable to locate a critical tool, the impact was clear: lost assets led to increased delays and costs, often tens of  millions of pounds each year. Our engineering team set out to find a solution.

The challenge.

Today, most asset tracking solutions leverage cellular technology, which is really useful in a lot of cases. These trackers are usually the size of a deck of cards and are great for tracking relatively large assets with relatively limited temporal resolution; if you need to know where a container is once or twice a day, cellular is great.

But what if you want to track something smaller than a container?  Or what if you want more than a few check-ins a day?  For these use cases, cellular-based asset trackers present a few key challenges, which lead to painful trade-offs that customers have to make.

• SIZE: Even a deck of cards is too large to mount on things like fibre splicers, medical stretchers, tool boxes, string trimmers or pallet jacks. We needed something small, discrete and super ruggedised for the tough world of physical operations; something the size of a fun-sized chocolate bar.

• POWER: Cellular-based trackers are power hungry. Customers are forced to pick between longer battery life and lower check-in rates or shorter battery life and higher check-in rates. That’s not the kind of compromise we want Samsara customers to have to think about. We needed to find an alternative method for tracking that used less energy and offered real-time visibility.

• COST: Cellular trackers have expensive radios, GPS receivers and batteries.  Those costs add up and can be prohibitive for many applications, forcing customers to forego visibility of entire asset classes. We needed to ditch those expensive components and find something that would widen the aperture for trackable assets.

There was a clear opportunity to help our customers by building a real-time tracker that is rugged, discrete, reliable and cost-effective. It would require a completely new approach to what exists today.

The first industrial-grade Asset Tag.

After a lot of ideating, testing and development, we found the solution. The AT11, also known as the Asset Tag, is the first asset tag that is actually industrial grade in both its performance and reliability. It’s capable of tracking an entirely new universe of mission-critical assets and will save customers an incredible amount of time, energy and resources.

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What started with a small group of curious engineers became an incredible opportunity to help our customers. It was bottom-up innovation at its best, and the way we like to innovate at Samsara. Here’s how we did it.

A Bluetooth-enabled Samsara Network.

During the development of our Asset Gateways, the team studied a deployment map of Samsara’s Vehicle and Asset Gateway products in the real world. Our jaws dropped; the scale of our millions of connected devices on a map was hard to ignore.

A lightbulb went off. With our expertise in industrial-strength Bluetooth, we realised we could use that scale to create a new category of asset tracker for the world of physical operations. We could build a simple, low-powered Bluetooth device that would emit a location signal using far less power than cellular technology. A firmware upgrade could turn our millions of Vehicle and Asset Gateways into a network capable of tracking that device and enable you to put Samsara on any asset in your business.

A few firmware engineers began prototyping and tinkering to work out whether this idea had any hope at all. Would Bluetooth even work? Would the Samsara Network be dense enough to deliver the magical customer experience we had in mind? 

The team dived into prototyping, pushing the limits of Bluetooth range and battery life. Our experimentation ranged from software simulation to driving around finding hidden Asset Tags with our vehicles, all the while refining the concept with our customers. More engineers, a product designer and a full-stack developer jumped on the bandwagon and helped build our first end-to-end prototype for Samsara’s Hackathon, Hacksara. That demo was the catalyst; as soon as we saw it we knew we were going to build a product.

Unlocking incredible volumes of data.

Tracking an entirely new universe of assets using the Samsara Network would mean unlocking an unprecedented amount of new data for our systems to ingest. We had to build infrastructure that scaled from day one. Not only would our system need to be capable of processing hundreds of millions of data points, but it also had to do so instantly to provide our customers with real-time visibility of their smaller assets.

A single Asset Tag might be detected by hundreds or even thousands of gateways in the Samsara Network within just a few minutes. One of our key challenges was how to use these data points to surface the most accurate locations to our customers. We built algorithms that leveraged signal strength to triangulate an Asset Tag’s location. These algorithms needed to be robust enough to work in all kinds of use cases, from ground services equipment at an airport to a pallet jack moving on a trailer to a tool at a jobsite, and they needed to be performant enough to process hundreds of millions of data points in real time. That’s a tall order for day 0!

Rugged, long-lasting devices ready for any environment.

Even with great technology, the Asset Tag had to be as tough as the jobs our customers are doing daily in the real world. Our customers operate in the most demanding environments, from hot construction sites to snow-packed streets, and our goal was to ensure that the Asset Tag would consistently deliver, whatever the conditions. Our close customer partnerships brought in the real-world insights needed to effectively balance size, durability and battery life.

We designed a product with no moving parts, a sealed battery and a rugged exterior that could handle drops, vibrations and extreme temperature swings, all while delivering uncompromised performance. We threw it from the roof of our building, sprayed it with chemicals, dropped heavy tools on it, froze it, thawed it, shook it and designed a test to simulate being thrown in the back of a pickup 5,000 times. We even took the asset tag to a driving range and swung over 2,200-kg-worth of force at it. 

We performed hundreds of hours of power consumption testing to make sure the device worked reliably across these various environments and conditions. Our engineers fine-tuned the device hardware and firmware to achieve an impressive four-year battery life without sacrificing operating range or increasing the tag's size.

A culture of continuous innovation.

The AT11 is the first of its kind and enables customers to now track almost anything. This incredible team effort spanned across Hardware, Firmware, Software, Product, Design, PMM, Sales Engineering, Sales and many more teams. 

We built a high-quality, impactful product from the ground up with urgency to deliver to our customers quickly. Our pace of innovation is only accelerating as we unlock more capabilities across Samsara’s technology and network. Through customer partnerships and a builder mindset, we are proud to continue to transform the world of physical operations.

Samsara is a fantastic place to apply your skills as a builder and creative problem-solver while making a meaningful impact. We are inspired to play our part in transforming industries that have been underserved for decades. From reducing CO2 emissions to helping prevent accidents, you can help Samsara assist essential industries around the world to operate safely, efficiently and sustainably.

Learn more about Samsara’s open positions and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram for the latest updates.

Thank you to Dan Landau, Grant Kalasky, Wael Barakat, Harini Kumar, Sundar Pandian and Rob Baker for contributing to this story.