A product long in the pipeline, people!
If I’m being totally frank, last week’s piece about inconvenience was 73% about actual inconvenience (broken laptops, AI’s tech-hogging tendencies) and 27% about the heartbreak of a lost Guinness.
Well, this week I’ve been thinking about inconvenience again. But in a very different sense.
Rather than pondering the mild chaos that arrives uninvited in everyday life, I’ve been reflecting on the sort of inconvenience that takes you back to the drawing board…
And I have to say… that sort of inconvenience is (normally) totally worth it.
Anyone who’s ever tried to build something new will know the feeling. You think you’re nearly there… and then you realise you’re not.
A tweak becomes a redesign.
A redesign becomes another prototype.
Another prototype becomes another six months of tinkering.
Product development has a similar rhythm to dieting. Or training for a race. You’ve got to put in the hard yards before you see any results. Enthusiasm is all well and good. You can download Couch to 5k and buy some wildly optimistic running shoes, but the moment you go for that first jog you realise the marathon is still a very long way away.
The reason for that slightly cryptic and slightly cruel metaphor: we’ve been working on something for the past year-or-so at Smoke Screen:
Sentinel Go.
In simple terms, Sentinel Go represents our first proper step into battery-powered security fog.
Now, that might not sound particularly dramatic unless you know how our systems have traditionally worked. Historically, our units have been mains powered. Solid, dependable, wired-in installations. That works brilliantly for most environments.
But there are places where mains power either isn’t available or can’t be relied upon. Remote farm buildings. Construction sites. Storage containers. And in some parts of the world – South Africa being the obvious example – regular load shedding means power simply isn’t guaranteed.
So the idea of a battery-powered system has been floating around for a while.
The challenge, as it turns out, is making one that’s actually good.
Not “good enough”. Not “it’ll do”. Properly good.
As we developed the product, we knew the batteries needed to deliver the right output at the right time. The tech caught up with our ambition. Then, as we tested it, we realised the heating system needed rethinking. Efficiency mattered, but reliability mattered even more.
Which meant redesigns. More than once.
But eventually things started to click into place.
Sentinel Go is built around something we think is quite powerful in its simplicity: three different power options in one unit. I won’t go into crazy detail on this (but you can find it in our recent blog).
Basically, Sentinel Go can run completely standalone on battery power – ideal for sites with absolutely no infrastructure. It can accept a trickle charge from things like solar panels or temporary site power. Or it can run from mains supply if that’s available, giving partners the option of a faster, lower-cost installation without the usual electrical work.
One unit, three configurations.
Or as Scott put it rather neatly: “Power is optional. Protection is not.”
Sentinel Go also sidesteps a lot of the installation efforts of our other fog machines, which could save partners time and cost on certain types of sites. Ideal.
I remember a conversation from well over a year ago now. A large operator told us they had more than seven hundred(!) remote locations needing protection.
In a way, that was the spark that kick-started our development of Sentinel Go. Seven hundred sites with unreliable power tend to focus the mind.
And yes – it’s taken a fair bit of effort to get here. A few redesigns, a healthy dose of patience, plenty of good old-fashioned head-scratching. But sometimes the longer road gets you somewhere better.
Being able to loop back to that operator and say… “yep, it’s ready” was an incredible feeling.
Forgive the small pat on the back – we’re rather proud of this one.
Worth the inconvenience and the hard graft, one hundred percent.