Lifetime of HWg Products: Products We've Made in 20 Years

One of the core values of HW group has always been the rule of 30+30 Min.
A maximum of 30 minutes to install our products (sensors wiring) & with up to 30 minutes to set up basic functionality (device setup). Along with a focus on the long-term reliability of our products. 

Longevity and long-term reliability is a part of HW group's DNA, and we mean it - many of our products are still in service, providing business-critical monitoring after 5, 10, 15, and in some cases, 20 years.

All of our products share the same philosophy, which means the project integrator or end user doesn't have to worry about difficult compatibility issues. And you can be sure that the warning message will get through.

With this article, we want to illustrate the evolution of HWg products, from our first development kits to a glimpse of what we're preparing for our customers in 2024 and beyond.

Charon1

Early 2000
The company's first real product was the first generation of the Charon module - a kit developed in-house. This was a game changer, basically it was an Ethernet (TCP-IP) interface for use with the then common RS-232 or simply "serial port".

This was all possible because a colleague of ours had written what we then called a TCP stack in assembler. Of course, it wasn't a TCP stack as we would call it today, simply because the processor we were using (AT89c51RD2) was quite old and didn't have a stack built in. At the time, it was a huge pain to program logic on these processors because they had no way to call subprocedures. So this processor was limited in applications where you needed to switch processes. But the upside was that this particular x51 core was very popular in the embedded community.

Charon1 development kit

Poseidon 1250

2005
HW group's first industrial and data center level device.

As we mentioned in the first article, a revelatory thing happened at CEBIT - people came to us and said that what they needed was a fraction of what is currently on the market. Smaller, cheaper, more focused. That was an engineer's crush on market reality.
That's when we started to see market segmentation: the same product in different versions for slightly different applications. And so we continued.

Poseidon 3266 and Poseidon 3268

2007
Nevertheless, after CEBIT 2006 we came up with Poseidon 3266 / 3268 - the first two models to embrace this philosophy. We took it even further by creating 4 Poseidon series units, each slightly different in what it can do and how much it costs.

The Poseidon 2250 came a little later - in 2009, with a GSM modem for sending SMS messages.

Damocles family

The Damocles line of monitoring devices was born around the same time (2008) in response to market demand for a more specific solution for someone who didn't need sensors, just detectors. However, at that time we couldn't offer anything between "we need a lot of inputs and outputs and maybe a few sensors" and "we have a lot of sensors and we need a few outputs".

HWg-STE

The original HWg-STE, our smallest and cheapest unit, was first manufactured in 2008 in response to customer demand for a smaller solution that could monitor one or two parameters at a remote location. It's only recently, after almost 15 years, that we have stopped production.

Ares

HWg-Tg11 - our first attempt to make a GSM/GPRS monitoring device in 2008-2009. It later evolved into Ares 10 GSM and LTE devices for remote monitoring, now effectively Ares 12.

In 2010 the CEO of HW group - Jan Rehak visited Iceland. He noticed that in Iceland there is a very specific case of need for remote monitoring in the absence of LAN. This was the reason why HW group created its first Ares product, which could send an SMS or email alert, but its main feature was cellular availability. For HW group, Ares accelerated the development of the SensDesk technology tremendously, and one can speculate that the SensDesk was quickly pushed to a significant milestone because of the Ares device.

WLD

2011-2012, tested since 2007.

The WLD system is the product we're very proud of, because creating a good and reliable heart of such a system - the sensing cable - is actually a very challenging task. Over the years, we at HW group have tested so many of them and finally landed on the current solution. Our specificity in this particular case was given by the fact that we need to monitor leaks mainly inside the building and not along the oil or gas pipeline, where it's really necessary to know at what distance the leak occurred, but at the same time such cables are very sensitive not only to the specialists who install them, but also to the conditions in which they are installed. 

This is the reason why our cable is different - it can be bent, it can be pressed without causing false alarms, it can be laid, for example, on a metal floor, which makes it possible to install the WLD system after all the floors have been laid, and so on. It is really versatile. It's really as versatile as a solution can be.

PWR

2010
The PWR family of devices is more or less the sole creation of our CTO Vit Olmr. He was the one who came up with an almost complete product aimed at connecting electricity meters, water meters, gas meters, calorimeters and other meters via the then relatively new Mbus protocol. It is an industrial device that requires a good understanding of one of these dimensions - either electricity, gas or water. It combines the ease of installation characteristic of all HW group devices with the extreme versatility of Mbus-based meters.

STE2

The STE2 series was launched in 2013 and was driven by our long-time colleagues David Smid and Petr Lukas. The STE2 series devices quickly became one of our most popular products and an inspiration for further development of smaller devices with narrower applications.

SD and NB series

In addition to developing the SensDesk technology, we wanted to create a smaller, one-dimensional device that would allow the device to be adopted online - with the help of the portal.

This was the cornerstone of the idea that led us to create two similar, yet different, series of devices: the SD and NB families. These devices could be installed and connected by almost anyone, and adopted at the portal - they don't have their own web server, and provide monitoring or update themselves only after being registered, as we call it "adopted", at the SensDesk technology-based portal.

When we created the NB series, we believed the mobile operators who claimed that the Narrowband IoT network standard would be quickly adopted across Europe, which hasn't happened yet. Nevertheless, we're thinking about different possibilities for the future of these two families of devices.

A rough estimate of how many HW group products are nowadays deployed:

70,000 STE and STE2 series devices (aggregated)

30 000 Poseidon devices (aggregated)

~ 150 000 sensors

2024: Perseus

A new family of our products will be called "Perseus". 

In the future, Perseus would replace many of our existing products as the next generation of our monitoring platforms makes it possible. However, we would continue to manufacture, ship and support our existing products. However, we hope that most of our potential partners and customers will want the new device with almost infinite features.

Along with the launch of the Perseus series as a product, another interesting thing will happen - a pre-sales department will be created in the HW group. This department will be responsible for customizing the platform and the project. And these two things would start at the same time. Templates for reading variables from third-party devices, LUA scripts, and different types of virtual sensors (we now call them meters) within the Perseus series of devices, as well as LUA script support in the SensDesk technology. With this powerful combination, in the future we would be able to deliver any type of monitoring project as a turnkey solution designed for a specific project.

Other notable features include:
- We will be able to connect 3rd party devices;
- Services are and will be part of the solution;
- LAN & LTE are two sides of the same coin called "communication".

Stay tuned for more news on the upcoming Perseus.

20 Years With You: Part One

20 Years With You: Part Three