Here’s every reason why you should not think twice before buying Bolt 2
We started Inventrom in December of 2012, post which it has been a story of failed projects and various attempts to find our mojo. What changed it all was the Bolt IoT Platform. We started working on Bolt on 7th Jan 2016 and we knew it was going to be a success when we got preorders of more than 200 units much before the launch.
Since the launch on 21st February 2016, we have had MNCs like Marico and ITC as well as multiple startups embrace Bolt to build their IoT products and services. Today we have more than 1000 developers building products and services on Bolt IoT Platform.
During the last one year, we have raised our first round of funding of INR 3 Crore and our team size has gone up three times. This also meant more resources to make the Bolt IoT Platform even better and thus started our quest to build Bolt 2.
As part of the Bolt 2 design, we worked on the philosophy of ‘building it for developer and user happiness’. We wanted to build an IoT platform that helps enterprise and makers alike in order to build IoT products and services quickly and easily. We also wanted to offer a complete development experience from interfacing of sensors to data analytics. All the efforts in this direction have worked well for us. The Bolt 2 is the best product we have built at Inventrom and is exponentially better than Bolt 1. Below are the features and services we are set to launch with Bolt 2:
Hardware
Bolt comes with a chip that helps you connect your sensors to the Bolt Cloud.
The new Bolt 2 card is 40% smaller than the Bolt 1 .
Bolt 2 is 3 times faster than Bolt 1. So if you click a button on your smartphone to glow a bulb, it will turn on in one-third the time it used to take with Bolt 1.
The Cloud LED lets you know if the Bolt is connected to the Internet and to the Bolt Cloud. So if your internet goes down, it will immediately alert you.
Removed the bugs with Bolt Hotspot.
The set-up becomes even smoother with the new Bolt IoT app which is now available for Android (and for iOS — coming soon).
Bolt 2 has got some beautiful & curvy edges and it comes in pearl white colour.
Now, in addition to the existing WiFi module variant, we are also launching the GSM module variant. The GSM variant is primarily targeted at our enterprise clients who want to deploy Bolt in the field and on the move.
Bolt App 2
We have launched a whole new Bolt app for Android and the one of iOS is in pipeline. The Bolt app lets you setup Bolt 2 in an intuitive and quick way.
With the new app you can now control and view the data in your smart devices, see the graphs and control devices via UI you built on Bolt Cloud.
Bolt Cloud 2
The Bolt Cloud is the biggest leap we have taken with Bolt 2. With the launch of Bolt Cloud 1 in May 2016, it was loved by many users for the ease of development and scalability it provides. But the Bolt Cloud 2 makes the earlier version look prehistoric.
Our experience of working with Bolt Cloud made us realise that it was the most important element of Bolt IoT Platform and this time we gave it the attention it deserves.
The ‘Maker Panel’ is now known as the ‘Developer Console’ which we feel describes it better as it is not a platform anymore used by students and makers only but is now witnessing a large scale adoption by the enterprise clients.
The ‘Types’ are now called ‘Products’. A Product is a group of Bolt devices that have the same type of software code and hardware interfaced to it. This is an important feature of Bolt to help in scalability. For example, let’s say you sell temperature monitoring system that collects data every 10 minutes and shows the temperature values in Celsius scale. However, now you have an update which collects the data every 5 minutes and shows values in Kelvin and Celsius both. With ‘Products’ you can simply update the new codes in the Developer Console and push the data to all the devices with just a single click.
The Bolt Cloud can now also store the data. Deploying a storage configuration is so easy that even a 5-year-old kid will be able to do it. This is made possible due to ‘Hardware Configuration’. Simply select the variable name and the pin to which the sensor is connected and you are good to go. The stored data can be downloaded in an excel sheet or be fed to the Data Visualisation System or the Machine Learning System.
The Bolt Cloud 2 is intuitive so that you won’t feel a need to refer to any workshop or tutorial as you build your IoT products on Bolt.
Another feature of Bolt Cloud 2 that makes it so awesome is the whole new way of data visualisation. If in Bolt Cloud 1 it took you 200 lines to visualise the data in the form of a graph then you can do that with Bolt Cloud 2 in just 3 lines of code. Yes, no kidding! Try it to believe it! We have also introduced, new graph types like Bar Graph, Scatter Plot, Area Graph, Stepped Chart, Histogram & Gauge in addition to the Line Graph offered earlier. Each of these graphs have further visualisation support like in the Table you can have colours to mark values based upon Threshold, Number formatter, Date formatter, Cross-hair etc.
In the visualisation page, you can also view device status now as ‘Online’ and ‘Last Seen’, just another feature to make sure your devices don’t cheat on you.
The feature that I love the most in the Bolt Cloud 2 is the Bolt 2 APIs. We now offer APIs to fetch data and control the devices from any platform. Bolt provides bindings for platforms such as iOS, Android and portable languages like python, PHP, etc. I will be writing a separate blog explaining the Bolt APIs in detail soon.
We are currently working with some of the best UX and UI experts to give it the finishing touch. We will be launching this latest version via crowdfunding.
You can stay tuned to updates through the link mentioned here — https://goo.gl/3lWHbo
We are excited for the launch of Crowdfunding for the Bolt IoT Platform and expect it to receive all of your love & support.
