endiio’s Dr. Tolgay Ungan proudly accepted the certificate handed to him by VDMA Vice President Hartmut Rauen at an event in the Maritim Hotel in Berlin. Ungan and his team are wildly excited about being named the VDMA’s start-up of the year. Visitors at the mechanical engineering summit event streamed towards the Austrian company’s small stand, eager to learn more about the company and Ungan’s technology. “We also experienced large numbers of visitors to our stand at Hannover Messe, which further confirmed that we were on the right track”, says Ungan.

He describes how their radio centre controls up to 65,000 sensors. Commands are reliably transmitted via a mesh network: “With our patented wake-up on demand radio technology, the sensors are in an energy-saving deep sleep, but they can be ‘woken up’ at any time to access real-time data.” Each sensor node functions as a router so that large energy-saving and self-configuring mesh networks can be achieved as well as IoT systems with little effort and a minimum of hardware. With respect to the maintenance intervals of the sensors, Ungan thinks that the technology has achieved “new levels” and that with sophisticated sensor networks the required robustness can be secured.

The endiio solution is based on “completely new patented radio technology” and is as much as 10,000 times more economical in real-time mode than all conventional communication solutions such as Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee or WiFi. The endiio radio module is available as a certified IoT solution for OEM systems and as part of the endiio Evaluation Board. The certified radio module (ETSI EN 300.220) includes a gateway as well as customizable software and sample projects which, Ungan claims, enable developers and OEMs to easily integrate real-time communication capabilities into their applications – whether in production, automization or security technology – without knowledge of the programming.

endiio is a spin-off from Freiburg University and is financed by the aws venture capital fund (considered to be one of Austria’s most active risk capital financiers) and the Austrian investment company Situlus Holding. Without the investment of a six figure sum the concept could not have been developed into workable industrial solutions. “The award is thus also an award acknowledging our investors”, explains Ungan with evident pride.