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Little Bird Systems of Fayetteville Puts ‘Internet of Things’ to Industrial Use

5 min read

Bryon Western and Edgar Cilio of Little Bird Systems bonded over taekwondo, work for chicken feed and love figuring out ways to work on the “Internet of Things.”

Western, 33, and Cilio, 35, met several years ago while working for Arkansas Power Electronics International of Fayetteville. They were both graduates of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and hugely interested in electrical engineering products for industrial uses.

Early-morning, high-intensity taekwondo training made the two realize they would make a good business team. They formed Little Bird Systems and, within the past year, went to work full time at the company, which operates out of a 180-SF office at the Genesis Technology Incubator at the Arkansas Research & Technology Park in Fayetteville.

“That’s where Edgar sleeps,” Western joked, pointing to a pile of 40-pound bags of pellet bedding.

The pellet bedding is a stand-in for chicken feed for a product that Little Bird Systems is designing for commercial poultry farmers. An industry executive contacted the pair about devising a system for commercial farmers to keep an exact accounting of how much chicken feed is stored in 30,000-pound feed silos.

“Right now, the only way they have to do that is someone crawls up the thing, bangs on the side of it and, if it’s low, then they call,” said Western, the CEO of Little Bird Systems. “They wanted to come up with a system that was really easy to install that they could get that information out over the cellular network. The real problem is the being-easy-to-install part. We came up with a solution where we hook a thing up to the side and it shakes it a little bit and through the vibration signature you can tell how much is in there. We’re in the process of that design.”

Testing that design includes filling a steel barrel with pellet bedding and measuring the accuracy of results. Western said he climbed into the barrel once, and the device more accurately recorded his weight through vibrations than it did Cilio’s.

“I’m closer to the density of chicken feed than he is,” Western said.

Industrial Focus

The two executives — Cilio is the chief technology officer — clearly get along well, which is good because their office is cramped. They also complement each other’s talents; Western is more of a forward-thinking, big-picture man, while Cilio is the one who excels at zeroing in on the current problem at hand.

Together, they have 14 approved patents and another half-dozen in the approval process. They have decided to use their brains and skills in the industrial sector on the Internet of Things, the term used for a network of items interconnected and exchanging data.

The Internet of Things is more often associated with retail, but Western and Cilio wanted more meaningful results.

“Having the ROI for those companies is something that drives us, rather than a lot of the consumer applications that are doing silly things like measuring how long your eggs have been in the refrigerator,” Western said.

Western and Cilio have designed a workable sensor that can withstand the chemical bath of the silver-plating process. The $200 gizmo can help prevent $60,000 parts from breaking because of an inaccurate bath process.

Cilio is also working on a sensor that can verify the correct coupling of a tractor and trailer at a trucking terminal. That could prevent mistakes such as a driver arriving in Des Moines with a load of refrigerators when he was supposed to be delivering something else.

Industrial applications are “unglamorous” in the world of the Internet of Things, said Startup Junkie founder Jeff Amerine. Little Bird Systems participated in Amerine’s 2.7.0 accelerator program in September.

“These guys are really, really good at hostile environment type of stuff,” Amerine said. “If you need to put a sensor into a situation where it is hot or it is grimy or it is wet, these are guys who really know how to do that. There are also a lot of unsexy industrial things. Anything you want to manage or monitor remotely and cost-effectively, that’s where the industrial Internet of Things is going. There is going to be huge time and money savings.”

The company’s third executive is COO Jim Lewis, an experienced businessman with a long list of contacts in the corporate world. Western said Little Bird Systems is in the process of raising $720,000 in funding so it can add a couple of employees this year and next.

“There are a lot of people who are interested in venture capital and angel investing here, but not if your business plan and technology start to be too difficult to understand,” Western said. “We’ve gotten a lot better at that. We finally started talking about the feed level monitoring, and that’s something people can understand.”

Small Company, Big Goals

Western said there are numerous opportunities for small companies in the industrial sector, and a lot of that is because of the small profit margin for any one solution.

“One of the reasons there is opportunity for smaller companies to take advantage is because the larger companies tend not to have the specialized expertise to develop these systems,” Western said. “The larger companies that do have the expertise to do it, it’d take $500,000 and a couple of years to get something developed.”

The trick that Little Bird Systems is trying to solve is perfecting the basic platform for a whole host of applications. Cilio said a platform would significantly trim the time and expense currently involved in each individual solution.

For example, the sensor for the chemical bath took 14 months to design and develop. It has not been a big seller because the company executive who asked for it was promoted to another division by the time it was completed.

The silo and the trucking devices could also take as many as a couple of years to complete.

“Developing a platform that allows you to get from concept to product placement is the end goal,” Cilio said. “There are a bunch of the smaller several-million-dollar opportunities, but if you can leverage the backbone technology on a platform, then it becomes much easier to address them all.”

Cilio said he doesn’t think the industrial sector is overlooked but the cost efficiencies aren’t there as they are for retail. Developing a common platform could shed approximately 75 percent of the costs off each application.

“Sometimes it takes $500,000 to solve a $4 million problem,” Cilio said. “In our case we’re driving this to a more pragmatic way of designing. We can address all of these in a cost-effective way from a common platform.”

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