OTA Solution for a Connected Secure Box with a Smart Lock
Company Biography
BenchSentry is a technology company based out of Lakewood, Colorado. It provides a connected secure box with a smart lock called the BenchSentry Package Vault.
The Package Vault sits on a front porch and protects packages as and when they are delivered to homes in the United States. Jen and her development team selected Mender to provide the OTA wireless system updating solution for the company’s fleet of Package Vault devices.
Challenge
One out of every three people in the US have had a package stolen at some stage so BenchSentry is addressing a huge security problem.
Choosing to buy rather than build, BenchSentry did not want to take on the complexity and development cost of having to develop an OTA updating solution in-house. Jen estimates that this would have taken at least 6 to 7 months to develop a homegrown OTA solution and then maintenance or new feature development would have to be budgeted for too.
Solution
Jen highlights the key benefits of Mender as reliability and responsiveness.
Jen explains that the smart boxes are quite expensive to ship to and from a customer. “It costs $70 to transport one of these boxes in the US, so if there is failure, the customer will not ship the box back. BenchSentry will have to send them a new one and carry that cost.” Also, if the device fails, Jen adds “there is no way for the BenchSentry team to troubleshoot, fix or redeploy the software updates.” These factors make Mender’s high level of reliability with the A/B partition update roll backs all the more crucial.
Benefits
Mender deals with the threat of bricking. She says she witnessed situations where even when a build had failed, the Package Vault using Mender for updates still continued to function.
In these cases, Mender had the ability to roll the device back to run on the previous software version. It’s business critical for BenchSentry to keep their devices running and to avoid device failure.
BenchSentry is a technology company based out of Lakewood, Colorado. It provides a connected secure box with a smart lock called the BenchSentry Package Vault.
The Package Vault sits on a front porch and protects packages as and when they are delivered to homes in the United States. Jen and her development team selected Mender to provide the OTA wireless system updating solution for the company’s fleet of Package Vault devices.
Challenge
One out of every three people in the US have had a package stolen at some stage so BenchSentry is addressing a huge security problem.
Choosing to buy rather than build, BenchSentry did not want to take on the complexity and development cost of having to develop an OTA updating solution in-house. Jen estimates that this would have taken at least 6 to 7 months to develop a homegrown OTA solution and then maintenance or new feature development would have to be budgeted for too.
Solution
Jen highlights the key benefits of Mender as reliability and responsiveness.
Jen explains that the smart boxes are quite expensive to ship to and from a customer. “It costs $70 to transport one of these boxes in the US, so if there is failure, the customer will not ship the box back. BenchSentry will have to send them a new one and carry that cost.” Also, if the device fails, Jen adds “there is no way for the BenchSentry team to troubleshoot, fix or redeploy the software updates.” These factors make Mender’s high level of reliability with the A/B partition update roll backs all the more crucial.
Benefits
Mender deals with the threat of bricking. She says she witnessed situations where even when a build had failed, the Package Vault using Mender for updates still continued to function.
In these cases, Mender had the ability to roll the device back to run on the previous software version. It’s business critical for BenchSentry to keep their devices running and to avoid device failure.
