Develco Products customizes wireless, white-label products for companies within the fields of home security, insurtech, and home care. Since the company’s founding in 2007, Develco Products has developed, produced, and marketed products based on a wide range of technologies for customers supplying end-users with IoT solutions. The solutions cover wireless devices for existing solutions or a complete ready-to-use IoT platform, both designed to be easily set up and integrated.
For several years Develco Products and Nabto have been working closely together to create many successful solutions for various customers in the IoT sector. One of these is the Nabto technology integrated into Develco Products’ hardware solution, the Squid.link Gateway.
About the Squid.link Gateway
The Squid.link Gateway from Develco Products is an open Linux hub and modular platform. It is a very flexible solution for wireless connection of sensors, alarms, smart plugs, thermostats, etc., that can handle various wireless protocols simultaneously. The gateway communicates via WLAN, cellular networks, or Ethernet, and supports several networks like Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wireless M-Bus, Z-Wave, and WLAN HAN networks.
The Nabto software solution in the Squid.link Gateway
The Nabto SDK allows users to communicate directly with the Squid.link Gateway through a tunnel that offers remote access to the REST API available on the gateway from client apps. Nabto’s software ensures a direct and secure connection, which provides exceptional interactive performance. For example, the connection can be used to control attached light sources, whereby the direct connection yields a user experience of instantly turning on/off lights with no command lag.
“Nabto enables easy, fast and reliable communication directly between our Squid.link Gateway and mobile apps. This allows data to pass from the gateway to the app at high speed without additional Cloud cost and with much lower latency than in the Cloud.“
– Poul Eriksen, CTO of Develco Products
As the figure below illustrates, the Squid.link solution consists of three components:
- The end-user client, which can be a smartphone, a browser, or a server application.
- A cloud service to establish a direct connection.
- The Squid.link Gateway with the Nabto SDK.
The Nabto cloud services mediate establishing the direct connection between the end-user client and the gateway. Once this connection is established, all communication travels directly between the end-user client and the gateway, the Nabto servers are out of the loop. If the internet connection goes offline, the Nabto technology still enables the communication between the two peers as long as the client and the gateway are on the same local area network.
Nabto technology enables connectivity directly through firewalls without any manual firewall configuration. The connection is end-to-end encrypted, which means the data travels securely from the Squid.link Gateway to the end-user client with high privacy and is protected from intruders.
Furthermore, the direct connectivity of Nabto’s technology will result in a high-speed solution with low latency. For example, this can be useful when unlocking a smart lock or turning on and off a light. Because there is no relaying over a third-party server, the user’s action will be an instant reaction, which positively enhances the user experience.
“Many of our white-label customers have adapted the Nabto software for direct video streaming, instant readings of sensor data like temperature, power consumption and humidity, or remote control like switching on/off lights and alarms. Nabto has also been very supportive both to our customers and to us.“
– Poul Eriksen, CTO of Develco Products