2016 — 2017
Wetlantec IoT
Custom LoRa hardware for remote water-level monitoring, from hobby electronics to a shipped product.
An internal R&D experiment at Bouw7 (later Exact Bouw) exploring custom IoT hardware — eventually handed over to Wetlantec, a Dutch water treatment company, once it turned out to be outside Bouw7's own business. Custom LoRa-connected sensor units for monitoring water levels in the field, where WiFi wasn't available and cellular connectivity was too expensive to run at scale.
Wetlantec IoT started as an internal research and development experiment at Bouw7 (before the company became Exact Bouw) — exploring what custom IoT hardware could do beyond the construction management software Bouw7 built day to day. Water-level monitoring was the test case: something that could sit in a remote field, report reliably, and run for a long time on very little power, without WiFi or a cellular contract for every unit.
I took my hobby electronics experience and turned the idea into working, sellable hardware: custom units built around a LoRa radio module from Dapu Telecom, with firmware modified in C++, registered onto KPN's national IoT network for long-range, low-power connectivity. It worked — but it was outside Bouw7's actual business, so the project was eventually handed over to Wetlantec, a Dutch water treatment company specializing in natural wastewater purification, for whom water-level monitoring was directly useful. From breadboard prototypes to assembled, serial-numbered, weatherproofed enclosures, it went all the way to production — shipping as a full box of units.
