One year ago, I concluded the project’s roadmap with a plan. And everything happened, literally: we finally have the startup company and the indieGogo campaign became a reality, exceeding the initial funding goal.

And this is just a tiny bit of everything that happened in 2015. It’s been a really successful year, with so many important events that turned an idea into a successful story.

How did this happen?

There is no fixed recipe nor a specific path to walk. The only thing that stays constant is that state of mind, called will. Will is the only resource that can focus everything around us into a given result. When we truly want something, we get a chance to make it happen. So success becomes a result of strong determination. And to fuel it and keep on going, despite the many obstacles, you can probably think of how short our lives are, and how little time we have to make something that matters. It works for me.

Thank you, stranger!

uRADMonitor started as a tool to make our lives better. It promised to look at the environment and show us factors that can damage our health. We all need that, our bodies are fragile. The motivation to build this system was strong. I wanted to make it happen, and invested a lot of time in it. This is how the project evolved, seeing one hardware design after another. Then there was the extraordinary user community, “strangers” that believed in this idea, and put a lot of trust to help it happen. It is them, this couldn’t have gone this far without, hundreds of daring people, sharing the vision.

We did good, again

It was nice to hit the 100 user landmark at the end of 2014. We managed to raise that to almost 400, and need to keep our systems in great shape, as heavy loads are expected with the network increasing even faster.

First, the project was again in the high ranks of the Hackaday Prize competition, but this time as a Finalist in two categories. I had the chance to hold a speech at the Hackaday Super-conference, and covered the uRADMonitor project as well:

We took the first prize at the Innovation Fair in Arad:

We met great people, got a lot of positive feedback and many encouragements:

On the technical side, we managed to update the server infrastructure to make it big data ready, and data access became faster. Then the uRADMonitor model D was developed, and with this device the entire project shifted towards environmental air quality monitoring.

We’ve seen the first tools created by the community, with the uRADMonitor-X and the many scripts created around the model A’s direct LAN json access.

There are so many things to do next. We’ll have to finalise the server API, to drop the fixed IDs, to create our first mobile apps for Android and iOS, to develop more innovative hardware and track the environment better, to improve uRADMonitor as a service, to address our first B2B customers. As you can see, things are getting more complicated, the plan has increased in complexity. We’ll need a bigger team. But we’ll get there, one step at a time.

Happy new 2016!

Yours,
Radu Motisan
the one guy that handled all the soldering, the software, and the server 🙂