Urban Mill

Urban Mill / Startup Sauna outside Helsinki is definition of new cool. Laidback, anarchistic, hipster incubator lab next to Aalto, the major tech university. Anyone can get in and hang around, desks are available on a “first come first served” basis. Old factory buildings, high roof and no walls. Open space – in every possible meaning.

Active Life Village in Urban Mill, Helsinki

We knew immediately that this was a perfect location for one of our smart home labs. Urban Mill is defined as a “co-working and co-creation platform prototype for urban innovation”, sporting several initiatives that fit perfectly with ours. ActiveLife Village is all about wellbeing for senior citizens, lots of wireless home solutions and technology. Asema is doing great stuff in smart energy management. We can create a really cool cluster of companies out there, allowing developers to innovate in even more sectors than we had imagined. 

Our lab in miniature

Arctic Raspberries

We spent two days in Oulu this week, working with Tony & co from Symbio “rapid prototyping team”. They had done a great job in short time, and we now have a functioning hardware prototype! After testing porting OpenWrt and Zigbee USB dongle to Raspberry Pi, Pandaboard and SABRE Lite development boards, we decided to go with Raspberry Pi. It has better support from the community, and is easily available to any DIY geek that want to try our technology out at home. 

Our Raspberry Pi with Zigbee USB dongle

The compromise is that we cannot support too much of transcoding and other CPU heavy operations in the prototype. But that’s ok for prototype and lab experiments.

It was our first visit to Oulu, but definitely not the last. Really impressive competence cluster, located just short of the Arctic Circle. Given recent changes at Nokia, there are now heaps of start-ups doing world class R&D and innovation, mostly focused on smart and embedded devices. Oulu rocks!