Let’s rewind the most exciting timestamps of our first-ever offline session!
On September 12th, many of you possibly had two options: join Apple's "Wonderlust" event or come to Vilnius for our flespi conf 2023. We’re pleased you’ve selected the red pill.
List of topics we’ve covered:
Around 100 attendees from all over the world met offline at Marriott Courtyard to shake hands and meet in person. The flespi team was aware that most of our clients represent a diversity of telematics domains. The 6-hour content had to be a comprehensive blend of new practices and approaches developers could start using right away. After more than 3 months of preparation and packing things up, finally, we’re all set!
We made a long journey. During over 6+ years of development, as flespi's Chief Gurtam Architect, Aliaksei Shchurko said, we're running continuous rounds of 19 tests from 17 remote locations to guarantee the highest level of reliability while connecting more than 700,000 devices to the flespi platform at once. We report extremely high uptime values available in real-time mode. The 12 team members you're all familiar with in support chat sessions are being challenged with an ocean of technical requests throughout the day, month after month, which helped us to continuously expand and upshift the platform, making it the most flexible and scalable telematics API solution ever. But let's go step by step.
After a history flashback and fast facts about flespi, our Software Engineer, Nadzeya Mikhailava, made a deep dive-in about core flespi entities: channels, devices, and plugins. The key to mastering the Telematics Hub is to know the ways the data is represented on each level.
Understanding flespi's data flow lets you see how it passes through layers and how it's been stored to be parsed and consumed with the help of MQTT API, REST API, or downstream integrations . And please don't forget about plugins - it's a magic wand at your disposal!
Jan Bartnitsky, who already featured our UX/UI webinar this summer, talked about integrations, meaning the effectiveness of consuming messages from the platform - how it's organized in a simple way.
Though flespi offers lots of pricing options even compared to the biggest cloud services, it's always better to show the speed, reliability, scalability, and cost in comparison. Yes, we support integration with many leading data providers, though we do encourage not to be afraid of using the MQTT broker. "Just try MQTT," appealed Jan to the audience with a smile, and I agree. :)
Now, Aliaksei is back again with what I believe was the most insightful part of the event - reporting and analytics. Flespi is a powerful toolkit to accurately pull out the data you need while handling it with care.
Detecting parameter changes, doing complex math, and applying counters and intervals results not only in reports. It makes it easier to represent data in dashboards, detect multiple device problems, and get everything automated. The analytics can be fun: it's fast, highly customizable, and the cost is predictable.
Oh, we touched on the automation topic. It's a pity if you missed the chance to listen to Jan as he talked about particular use cases done with zero-scripting. Working with devices in groups. Webhooks usage (e.g., it can capture a "device creation" event and assign it to a group).
There's always room to make some data processing run automatically (you can start by creating devices in bulk). Not skipping options on how you can configure a device. It's difficult to express my anticipation, but I believe we will shed some light on Jan's presentation video in a month.
...and to sum up the first part of the day - here comes the security. Over the last decade, it's been a topic of incredibly high attention and it will remain in the future, so we couldn't miss the point.
Covering the key points of flespi account access, Aliaksei introduced the ways to organize the account using different token types, subaccounts hierarchy, grants, and realms concepts to isolate client's data, secure production accounts, and provide the support team with access to the platform.
Flespi conf was declared not to be only about the theory of development. We complied with the promise, and the rest of the day was more biased toward practical insights and trending topics in the telematics industry.
As soon as the flespi UI workshop caused applause, our VP of Business Development, Sergei Leuchanka, who has been conducting the whole event, got back on the stage to talk about flespi as the Data and Integration Hub. We've already talked about how easily flespi beats the giants with more predictable pricing, but we didn't showcase any other fleet telematics platforms or specialized IoT/telematics tools - so we did it.
However, the real interest of the event was 100% focused on the video functionality being implemented nowadays at the fastest pace possible.
The concept vision presented by Aliaksei highlighted the following aspects:
Provides video data storage with playback over the Internet.
Durably retrieves video on demand from the device.
Provides live video streaming from the device.
Should be easy to integrate into downstream applications.
Should be transparent and affordable.
The closing panel discussion was devoted to the future of telematics hardware. We asked our esteemed hardware partners Marius Slavinskas (Teltonika Telematics), Mindaugas Pranaitis (Ruptela), Leon Zhu (Howen), Ivan Jerković (Queclink), and Jose Serrano (JimiIOT/Concox) to share their thoughts and vision with the developers.
Notably, the conversation highlighted the growing significance of BLE devices in enhancing connectivity and efficiency within the telematics landscape. Teltonika, one of the prominent participants, provided insights into their forthcoming Fleet Telematics platform. Additionally, Howen proudly mentioned they had their first video devices successfully integrated with flespi. These discussions underscored the continuous innovation and collaboration driving the telematics industry forward.
Wrapping up the day, we'd like to thank all the attendees and partners for making this conference a remarkable and unforgettable event. Our speakers' team enjoyed every question, every technical comment, and every practical use case we discussed during Q&A sessions and in the networking zones. So, here's a short video, and let's make it live again!