Episode 332 ControlTalk NOW: Introducing Troy Harvey and PassiveLogic. Seriously, PassiveLogic is a GAME CHANGER!

Announcer
The following is a presentation of the control trends podcasting network.

Eric Stromquist
Hi, welcome to control talk. Now you’re smart buildings, video guests and podcast for the week ending September 29 2019. This is Episode 333 where we talk about all things Smart Controls, and introducing your coast to mind this week is my wife Anna. So interesting man, the legend. The man the myth, the legend Kenny smile. Now you better say welcome your coast to mine. welcome your host in mind, your co host my co host and mine, man, the man the myth, the legend, the one the only

the only secret agent man.

Okay, thanks,

brother. Well, man, here we go. Man. We kicking off another week on control trends. That’s something that’s hard to top.

Ken Smyers
That’s hard to top. Eric.

Eric Stromquist
I tried now that she has to introduce you from now. Right? Is that the deal? I certainly

Ken Smyers
don’t mind done. I can’t can’t say anything that gets in trouble here. Other than say that was a very, very special introduction. He did a fabulous job and he did a fabulous job.

Eric Stromquist
She just glad to hear think will keepers. Certainly good brother.

Ken Smyers
Hey, man.

Eric Stromquist
We got a lot going on this week. We’ve got an incredible guest teed up. And this is this is somebody you’re going to want to hear is he I think he described this technology, Kenny is sort of like the atom bomb of our industry, I could change everything. So you don’t want to hear our guest this week and hear what he has to say and see what he has to show us. Before we get to that buddy, we got a couple of things going on, on control trends.

Ken Smyers
Character Yeah, the week itself was just one of those weeks that escaped the, there was a lot going on, we’ll be doing some catch up work. We talked, you know, pretty much, you know, through the through the course of the week, we were in a training, you guys had some training going on does your location I saw it came see training going on. So this has been a week of move movement around and innovation and you know, just incredible amounts of innovation technology available, how we’re going to get that from the vendors to the to the market is hard work, you got to get out there and get your feet on the street, you’re gonna have people come in classrooms, and whatever, because the dissemination is important. And then there’s just again, I we were fortunate, we worked through western Pennsylvania with Siemens, this week and met some group bill coil did a great job, we had Brent and from Siemens, in both these guys are consummate professionals, and the fact that they brief engineers, they brief X ray, X ray folks on different committees and whatever. And then we brought it to the trade schools to 0449. And it was really cool, because we’re seeing the clarification within our industry, we went through some interesting things with the devaluing that we saw from originally believed mo and Johnson has their version of piggy and Siemens certainly has a very good version, but we did some clarifications on mechanical variants and electronic variants, you know, where you can use sensors out there different points, fine return and pressure, and then you can have it happen within the valve itself. And what the benefits are of each, the revision of HPC division 23 you know, the lighting 26 and the shades, division 12. All are coupling and coming together in this division 25 so that you get the master systems integrator, you get the integration. We see a lot of people, you know, these these people that are doing this day and the feet on the street people, the actual installers, the actual trades, people, the actual contractors are on their own, and remarkable choices they have and how important their role is, is evolving. Eric, these are the people, these are the technicians, these guys have face to face contact with the users and people that are making decisions. And it used to be we’ve heard that inverted sales thing where it used to be, you know, trickle down top of the triangle, millions of dollars in companies, and how you went through the top hierarchy. And then the guy at the bottom who winds up doing all the work says this isn’t going to work this there’s mistakes being made here all along, and then all we’re doing around is driving and then we can hear this from a speaker or interview coming up that the way we’re doing things may need to be adjusted. Yeah, very, very cool.

Eric Stromquist
Far as am I going to know, Kenny, let’s talk about shake control, because that’s something in us anyway, is a relatively new thing. Talk about why that’s important and sort of us being integrated now under control specs?

Ken Smyers
Well, you know, there’s been some fabulous engineering done, you know, if you break things down, you’re breaking down into zones rooms, and a building. And the building is basically an envelope, you know, constructed above Earth, you know, and it’s subjected to the rise and fall in some way I the most recent model I saw so incredible is that a building is effected through the course of 24 hours, consistently so that you can get really good at knowing something sunset and how the building goes through different periods where this side is getting Sun is getting warmer, decides still in the shade it needs it needs to heat and how you mitigate those things for optimal energy spends, right, but within the zone itself, within the room itself, the automation that can bring the HPC at its highest efficiency optimization with the lighting, which could be from your ceiling lights, LEDs, you know, from the light you’re getting from outside. And all these things come to bear on if you get too much heat game because of air conditioning Come on. So if you have it was late enough outside, you don’t need your lights here, which is the best to create this off the maladies. And it’s not just energy efficiency, it’s comfort, it’s user satisfaction, it’s schools that have eight different lighting requirements scenarios, now we’re in the morning, lights to be this and the afternoon after lunch, they should be this. At the end of the school day, people were getting a little bit the students could get tired or whatever office workers he get tired, you know, after, after you guys come back two o’clock, it will sudden, they feel tired, you know, and it could be a condition that can be corrected, because it could be an Ambien condition, that we’re finally getting the metrics to understand what that can mean, why that’s happening, you know what and how to correct it, you know, so the tremendous things that have been going on at MIT and Harvard, human physiology and how it functions, the business cases that we’re learning from the different vendors on, you know, you could definitely improve the efficiencies, the energy efficiency, and also the occupancy experience. But now you’re getting the actual equipment. So started in Europe, out of efficiency, I would say, and as a probably unintended consequence, was greater comfort control, and greater, you know, just more pleasant environment. But now it’s coming to North America. And there were a couple leaders on, you know, the acuity purchasing of dis tech that was really launched at holding, at least in my world, and my understanding, and then you know, you had cnet’s is total room automation, which really packaged it in one control, you had the ability to do a total control of that zone, you know, and we saw how when you make this talk, the semantics, the taxonomy, of explaining stuff, first, you start with making a smart zone or smart or unified or integrated zone, then building and then they go all the way up to that smart city thing. But my knowledge came, I lived in Germany, nine years, and I’ve in the Air Force at the time, where I first experienced what was called real logic. And those were a very heavy, wouldn’t slanted type blind that when you put it down, it totally shut out the room. So nice to work swings and music come home, I never had to worry about lighting, affecting my sleep. And then that that the rise and fall of these are bringing these buying to the shades up and down was automated. So you have these little motors up in the side. And, and so my sister is still lives in Germany, when I go to her house, they have it all set on automation. So I mean, they houses You’re so efficient, but at 630 the shades go up and make

Eric Stromquist
makes a lot of sense. Because again, you know, we’ve all had the experience of being in a room and the sun’s beating in and it creates extra heat load, right. But if you automatically go down and speaking the same as Kenny, I mean, you remember two shows ago, we had the folks from Sema Don, and they had the cool RDY thermostat. And you know, we sort of had a thing, you know, sending your person that your celebrity that should get this thermostat and can you know, endeavor to get to that person and that a lot about participation in that. But the winner looks like it

Ken Smyers
was actually the RDS 120 BRDS 120 big

Eric Stromquist
gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Well, we got we got two of those that we’re going to be sending to based on our control trans community, Will Smith so will endeavor to get it to Will Smith, a cool guy. He’s a cool guy and his wife JD packets, Beth so and we’re going to say, you know, love letter from the control trans community. So who knows that might show up in a movie someplace, but maybe talking about great technology, can you keep the audience waiting any longer, smarter teacher mountain wants better is always different. But different is not always better. And we’re so excited, we’re going to introduce our community to a technology, a new approach. I can call building automation controls, all building automation controls are part of it. But this is going to be a session, you’re going to listen to the whole thing. So Kenny, introduce our guests. And let’s get started.

Ken Smyers
I’d like to I’m truly excited because of the prep work we did here for this is just amazing. This is a new innovation and technology. And it’s really exciting. It’s dynamic. We are pleased to bring Troy Harvey CEO of passive logic to control trends. Welcome to the show. Thanks, guys.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, well, I’m happy to be here. And I love hearing your guys’s discussion. So it’s fun to be on on your show? Oh, well,

Eric Stromquist
Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, listen, Troy, I think the first thing you had to sort of set of context is, yeah, you read your resume, your LinkedIn profile, it is amazing what you’ve done. I mean, you’ve done everything from engineering to software, I mean, how about walking us through as a start sort of your background? And sort of lead it up to passive logic? and What had you start passive logic, if you would,

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
yeah. So I started in the electrical engineering, product development space. And I spent a lot of time in my early career designing products for all kinds of customers, you know, IBM Research Laboratories and small inventors in a big marketing firms, whatnot. But in the early 2000s, at the initial like early days of the green building movement, I found myself doing building simulation work now in building simulations really interesting. Because up until that time, architects would design a building and they build it right. And, and when you think about it from a, like an engineering perspective, that’s kind of a crazy idea, you design it, and you do this one off experiment, you build it without any beta testing. And so we started doing this building simulation work, where we would enable architect come and work with us on their ideas. And we digitally beta test this in this virtual world, hundreds of different times, try different things and materials and whatnot, and and then start working through the mechanical systems of how you would control this, and how you would make those mechanical systems, you know, get the best outcome for the building. During this process, we started getting involved in the rest of the building systems, how, you know, how do we do mechanicals better? How do we do controls better. And like a lot of people in this space, what we found is that, you know, buildings would be designed really well, they’d be architected really well to be controlled by really competent controls teams. But then they kind of fall down when they got onto the ground. And we saw this happening throughout the whole industry. And then later, you saw the rest of the lead industry, like, you know, the LEED gold, platinum buildings, people started catching on to like, hey, our buildings aren’t actually living up to their engineering. So we took a step back, and we said, okay, what’s going on here? And we realized there were some fundamental flaws, some fundamental computer science theories that we could apply to building automation for why things were falling down on in on the ground. And there, it came down to a couple different problems that we saw. And so we said, okay, how do we go about this differently? How, how can we take everything we know about computer science theory and apply it to buildings? right about that same time, my firm was hired by my co founder, Jeremy. Now, Jeremy comes from the deep tech industry, he was one of the founding engineers of a company called fusion IO. And in your phone, and in your devices, you have flash storage these days, well, fusion IO invented the whole concept of high performance flash, using this real commodity flash chips, but doing in a way that you could actually store things and, and over and over and over without ruining your flash. And they had this really nice multibillion dollar IPO. He was building this cool house on the hill. And he saying like, how am I going to control this thing? So we hired my firm, this house a glass, and we start talking about the state of automation. And he said, Wow, I’ve been looking at the stuff as really kind of terrible, like, and I said, Yeah, let me tell you about it. And so he came on as an angel investor. And then within a couple months, he’s like, wow, this is just like, so much more exciting than watching fusion IO, floating to the distance. Let me come on as a co founder, and we started pathologic about four years ago.

Ken Smyers
Well, that’s really cool. This is this is exciting. As a Silicon Valley show. I love that series. And because a lot of stuff happens like that, and it really does in real life, but dumb. My first curious, how did you come up with the name passive logic? I mean, it’s two directions, and how did they come together?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, so we were thinking about the naming of passive logic and, and the two things that came to mind was, first, what buildings require the user today is a this sort of activity, they’re always bugging us for more and more interactivity, making it work, whether it’s on the thermostatic level, or as you get smarter and smarter buildings, what we’re finding is those smarter and smarter buildings are actually requiring more of the user, not less than the user. And when we start thinking about that, the logic of buildings, the automation of building should be like an assistant, right? It should just take care of things, and you shouldn’t have to worry about it, unless you are geeky enough to want to look at it. And so we were looking at, you know, hey, how can we as sort of the backseat user of the the automation sit in the backseat, while the car drives us? Right? How can buildings us take care of things, and we can just be a passive participant and but still have the buildings work for us work on our behalf? Very, very cool. Well, listen,

Eric Stromquist
Troy, I gotta ask. I mean, when we sort of talked before the show a little bit, you were pretty adamant about the fact that passive logic isn’t a BMS system building management system. It’s more of a Thomas building platform. Tell us about that, and the distinctions and what our audience needs to know about that.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yes. So as we stepped back from, you know, the problems that we were seeing on the ground, we said, you know, what the buildings really need. And you can look at what’s happening in technology, not just in the building space, but in all these verticals. And we’re looking at Systems Technology. And we’re saying, well, the end point is Systems Technology is autonomous systems. And that’s true for buildings. And when we look at the marketplace, and this is I think, what’s sort of underrated about the building’s market is we are the single largest controlled systems market in the world, right? by, by dollars by square footage by whatever metric you want to apply buildings have the biggest control systems. employment is autonomous systems. Well, what does that mean? What does that mean for everybody in the building marketplace, from architects, engineers, to us in the automation business, to the occupants that live in our buildings, to the guys who do the maintenance and management, the Eskimos that come in, to try to make buildings better to the utilities that we’re going to interact? And then further, when we start looking at the implications of autonomous buildings, we need to then start stepping back and say, Well, what are the implications for these smart cities that everybody talks about? Well, you can’t have smart cities, unless you have smart buildings. And today, we don’t have smart buildings yet. And a ton of building technology enables that. So there’s all these sort of ripples throughout the industry of how we work together, and the implications of what we do an automation system. What does that mean, for everybody else in the building value chain?

Eric Stromquist
That makes a lot of sense. And so it’s almost like you’re redefining the smart building. In other words, it sounds like part of your maybe mission statement or vision is if you have to put a lot of energy into it to make it smart. It’s not really smart, it should just be autonomous. And like you said earlier, passive logic, the passive aspect of it, you should be able to have it set up once and then just do what it needs to do to, to operate. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. being smart. And you haven’t.

Ken Smyers
There’s some work to get there, though. I mean, I love the thing. But I’m sorry, you mean to cut you off, but I just wanted to, I’m trying to follow this is our viewers do have it’s great what we’re doing, but the steps to get there. And we’re going to talk about this. But I mean, we’re saying that it should just lay on something and do it autonomous a bit, but they get it like you have some standards and stair steps to take in order to make this feasible. In other words, it’s not magic.

Eric Stromquist
Well, right. It’s not it’s not magic. But But you but you do use artificial intelligence as part of it, right? machine learning artificial intelligence. So that is kind of magic in my world.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, well, to two things here. First, I’d say the most important parts aren’t the artificial intelligence that help you do the controls most important parts. And we’ll talk about this in more detail, or this underlying deep digital twin technology. Because without that, you can’t apply any amount of artificial intelligence to solve the control problems we have today. But I think we have this balance right now, right? in the industry, when you look at a time to build and smart cities and the whole implications for the building industry. The thing that we see most of the industry not really coming to grips with is there’s one reality, there’s the guy on the ground, who’s probably an automation installer, who’s the only guy who’s actually putting stuff into building. So if you don’t address how you package this up into the thing that we need to get all the things that we want, then you’re not really going to be successful applying all these new ones for the whole value chain into buildings.

Eric Stromquist
Okay, so Troy, I just, I gotta be first. So you look like a super nice guy, you know, you look like a sit down have a beer with but you know, you sound pretty disruptive here, what you’re talking about seems like it could be very disruptive to, you know, how people do mode automation controls. Now, is that a fair statement?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
I think that’s a fair statement. Well, we see when we talk to the different players in the market, you know, they’ve really never seen anything like passive logic. And that’s on purpose. Because when we started this business, we said, well, there’s some fundamental flaws and the way we’re doing automation, relative to what we’re being asked to do in buildings, right? We just can’t apply the same technology to get the outcomes that everybody’s asking of us. And we told our guys, throw away everything you know about automation, put in the garbage. And let’s start from scratch. Because if we don’t do that, we can never get to where we want to

Eric Stromquist
go. So new standards, that sounds like

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
new standards. And and that’s the nature of that article that you were discussing. And now we can put up a visual if you’d like to talk about that. What we’re thinking in terms of automation.

Yeah. Can we do that? Let’s do that for sure.

Okay. So what we realized in this marketplace was we’re all starting to talk about smarter buildings, right? And this kind of nomenclature of balls out of the smartphone and smart home and this notion of smart Well, what is smart mean, and this is the fundamental problem we find in industry, as everybody’s talking together, people mean different things in terms of what smart is. And when we’re looking down the path of you know, the endpoint of all this intelligence is fully autonomous buildings. We said, Well, guys, you know, somebody solved this problem. And the Automotive Engineers associated, got together and said, hey, let’s come up with some nomenclature. And they came up with this level one, or level zero through level five. So it turns out, we had compare a ton of buildings to autonomous vehicles, they’re more the same, and they are different. People might struggle with this idea initially. But think about it for a second that a vehicle navigates through two dimensional map from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible without crashing anything along the way. And buildings, it turns out, we don’t move in space, we move in time. And it’s the exact same problem, we have navigate from point A to point B, and time only. It’s actually a little bit more sophisticated and buildings, right? We’re not Navigon, just one vehicle through this two dimensional map. We’re navigating a whole fleet of subsystems heating and cooling ventilation, lighting systems, energy systems and occupancy systems. That’s not just in two dimensions, it’s in multiple dimensions. As we go forward through time, we’re looking at all of these on ramps and off ramps of control decisions we could make. But it’s all interactive between of the systems in the whole building. So when we look at that comparison, today, most buildings are what we call level zero. This is manual control. This is thermostat x is the exact same thing as cruise control, you set your car to 60 miles an hour, and it’s cruising along at 60 miles an hour. In buildings, we do the same thing we said 72 degrees. And again, the building just maintains that 72 degrees, this is 99% of the industry today. What we see as the edge of the building industry today is what we call level one, this is adaptive step points. It’s the same thing as adaptive cruise control you’ve ever been in this kind of car, you know, it’s like driving at 60 miles an hour comes behind a slow car slows down, the car gets elevated, speeds up. Now, here’s the thing about adaptive cruise control is most people that you’ve talked to would say it’s just smart enough to be annoying, not smart enough to be useful. And we think that in the buildings world were, you know, maybe a little better off than that with some of these adaptive systems where you say, Well, I’m going to take this cloud based AI, and have it, poke at my thermostat x or adjust my P IDs, and do this adaptive it have the same exact infrastructure I’ve always had. Now, you know, and by always, we mean, this stuff is largely 100 years old or older PID came the 1930s and thermostatic came from the 1800s. And trying to poke at it with AI only gets us a very small distance down the path. So when we look at, you know, what does that path look like to get to the next step? Well, there’s this gap from taking conventional controls. And automating them a little bit, you know, automating our automation with a little AI, and how do we get to level 2345 and

beyond.

And you’re not going to be able to do that with the conventional infrastructure. What we saw in the buildings market, which is really interesting compared to the car market, is that there’s not just this cap at level five, because cars drive off the the factory floor, completely done, but we’re still building them out in the field, we’re still manufacturing a building in the field. And so there’s these interesting opportunities, we have that automobiles don’t have to take that same intelligence plant, not just to real time control, but apply it to how do we install building automation systems? And how do we make those automation systems interactive, not just worried about themselves?

Eric Stromquist
Right? So level 678 makes it makes it all affordable, because your cost installing commission goes? That’s right.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Now I’ve got this insight in the automation system, how do I bring that insight to bear to make our job as installers easier, better, more pain free? Now you

Eric Stromquist
guys already there with that?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
We are. We’re currently in pilot testing. So we have about 800,000 hours of cumulative time on our infrastructure, with a with a couple dozen projects, a couple dozen buildings, all kinds of technologies? Well, I know

Eric Stromquist
you talked to my engineering team at Stromquist. And company. And they were saying if I understood correctly, that it’s almost to the point that you could go into a building and you could have one manufacturer over here is parts and other manufacturers here and another manufacturers here and then your system will go out, find them discover them know what they were and sort of hook them up. So they communicated. Is that my understanding that correctly?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah. So our goal as a company was we saw all the this industry exploding sensor tech, an IoT and controllable is happening in buildings, right, more and more and more. And what we realized is like, you can come up with as many smart sensors or IoT devices as you want. But the thing that’s really missing in buildings is that organizational intelligence that brings it all together under one umbrella so that it’s all going to work together.

Eric Stromquist
You know, and it seems like one of the things I remember, I spent some time studying with an Edwards Deming disciple who was you know about quality, right. And one of the definition of quality, at least from Deming perspective is, you eliminate barriers, right, so you get predictability. And it seems like one of the wildcards, the way things are done now is, you know, one installer might installer program differently than another installer. So it seems like, if I’m understanding this correctly, level six, seven, and eight in your process is going to really up the level of quality and do you know, reduce the variance between from one installer to another? Is that fair say that?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
I think that’s it fair statement. The other thing that we see, as an industry, I think most people experiences today is that there’s far more opportunity for automation than there is expertise in the field to execute. Right. And, and this is a, you know, I think, Oh, I see this on a bunch of levels, what I find somewhat fascinating, I just spent about a month traveling and meeting with different players in the building industry. And I’d say in the automation industry, it’s very typical, when I go into a firm that the you know, guys that are driving the ship are in their 60s, and the guys that are the heads are in their 50s. And the youngest guy in the in the firm might be in his 40s. And then there’s this question of like, where all the 20 and 30 year olds right in our industry? Yeah. And I think there’s this problem, right, these guys have grown up in this, you know, world here, that they just can’t even relate to the tech knowledge we’re dealing with, because largely, while we all have 2019, our pocket, we’re going to work every day and still working in like 1985. Yeah, and these guys didn’t even grow up. This is well before their day, right, and I had a guy a week ago is telling me, I went through one of the major manufacturers training classes, things like it was such a cognitive dissidence of his reality compared to the reality of the automation industry. And think what we’re seeing is, if you got those skills today, you’re probably not working in automation, you’re probably going to work for Google or Apple or Facebook. And there’s an underlying happiness quotient there that I think that part of the challenge we see in our industry is that there’s what we’re being asked to do is fundamentally not possible with the technology we have, which leads to a lot of dissatisfaction. And you’re constantly as an automation engineer being kind of yelled at and told how you did it wrong. And you could go to Apple and make an app and everybody’s going to high five users. So we have this problem. We need to realign the industry and make it so that, hey, every day I go to work, I’m working with the world’s coolest technology. And that makes sense because it’s the world’s biggest control space. The last control talk now regarding you know, getting the this young guns into the industry getting this town in there, and you’re hitting the nail on the head, I wish, I hope everybody this this interview, because I think you hit several nail on the head about the 2019 being in your pocket. And yet we’re going to a 1995 environment telling everybody, this is cool, right? You guys gonna be happy here, you know, and you’re saying, hey, this, I can’t stand place I don’t see enough

Ken Smyers
does not have lighting heritage, it can’t breathe lyst in his own stuff, as the equipment is half of its dead, you just have your lane here, because it’s filling up space, and you won’t look like you got things together. But really, when it comes to technology innovations, it’s absent. So so I really dig that. I like that the analogy of the app, your high five, and because you work on on Discovery, and adventure, you come into work, excited to see if you get things through, you know, the system now we’re going to get them into execute them and bring them into a commercial reality where before you’re sustaining a problem where you are bad guy, you walk into day, and the best you can do is 70%. Well, you can you don’t get?

Eric Stromquist
Yeah, yeah, no, no, you’re right. You’re right about that. But the other thing I’m here and you know, why? Just so you know, we’ve been tracking for a while, you know, the lack of talent, and that gap keeps getting getting wide, we just don’t have enough people to do what needs to get done. And so, you know, we’ve we’ve talked at knowledge about how to solve that problem. And one of the solutions is obviously, how do we attract more people into the industry? But it seems like what you’re affording our community is okay, well, if you can attract them, you probably don’t need you’re not going to need them if you use our technology. So, you know, it seems like you are, you know, you’re eliminating the dependence on again, super talented individuals, which their lack of in our industry?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, well, I think it’s two sided. You know, one of the things we talk a lot about in the artificial intelligence industry is specifically in the vehicle face that artificial intelligence in some industries will, you know, vastly reduce labor and employment in the vehicle space, this is very concerning, because truck drivers are the number one job in America. And effectively, the technology’s there to put these guys are out of business out of work. And that’s, that’s concerned. And in the AI industry, we think about like, Well, how do we impact industries. But what’s really interesting here, and I think the really unique opportunity we afford in the automation spaces, that last mile that last, you know, three steps, is all on the ground, it’s going to take labor, and we have plenty of labor in the marketplace. We have h back in technicians and installers. And we have automation technicians that are all capable. But how do we democratize automation to get it to a wider audience, and not just a wider number of users? Because the installers, the these companies and the automation companies that are fundamentally the customers, right? It’s not usually the building owner? How do we get into more people’s hands? And then how do we get into more buildings? Right? How do we make it that’s cost effective to get into 1000 square foot building as much as a million square foot building. So I think we have a really interesting opportunity to democratize technology and get it you know, into broader market, broader hands better users,

Ken Smyers
which I am, this is great stuff really is it’s enlightening. It’s exciting. And I think you’re offering, you know, when something happens, and it’s disruptive, that’s not necessarily bad, it means you’re gonna have to change, you might last three steps, I’m going to use that again, hope you don’t mind that I really like that, because that means there is a place for people. But you know, getting down to the basics. And then one of the articles that you published in automated buildings, September about establishing smart building industry standard, you talked about the lexicon, you talk about things down to the base level of language, the words we use, we don’t not have a lexicon to describe, describe a smart building, how smart, smart, you know, navigating, you know, the disbelief that people have about technology, and how it can be put into effect very rapidly and very affordably. And then of course, when you’re done with all that, then you finally get to the common grounds, you can start talking about you know that they understand it. So how do we enlightened our own industry? HPC building automation, but also the users, you know, the big the big guys with CB Richard i think is their job, Sally, oh, they’re kind of there. But the vast market, the 80% of the buildings United States have very little, you know, automation, what would what past passive logic offers? How do we how do we close that gap?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
So I mean, your questions really important, what we’re seeing, and I think, somewhat To our surprise, because as a as a new technology company, what you really look for is those hurdles, right in the industry, to where you’re like, hey, there’s these big hundred year old players that we’re gonna have to jump over their hurdles. But we see a bunch of things, you know, so in, literally last week, I had a meeting with a, a group of mechanical Contractors Association, guys in Chicago, I met with some big general contractors from Japan. And I met with a group of one of the largest architectural firms, their their architects, as well as giving a lecture at MIT about a TAS billing system. So this whole range of different people with different views on the industry. And what we see in general is a level of excitement that what we’re doing is bringing people’s more consumer life experience to buildings, as opposed to this idea that we’re jumping too fast, too far above what they experienced with their current automation platforms. And I think this has to do with the level of pain in the industry, right? Fundamentally, at the end of the day, every automation project is painful, there’s a whole host of things that go wrong, we try our best to accommodate all the desires of the engineer and the architects, and the owners of these buildings and the occupants. But when you turn the switch on, where the guys who are the last out of the building, right? So we get blamed for everything. And then we get called A week later saying it’s not right, we roll a truck, we tweak and we tune, and we do this at infinitum, right, where we’re just going around in a circle between the customer complaining and us tweaking and tuning. And and the fundamental problem is the technology, the tools were using, are creating this level of dissatisfaction, right that we are just not capable of meeting the demands of industry. And so I think most people are like, hey, yeah, I’ve experienced this. This is every project to some degree, how do we make it better? Right, and I think we’re at that moment in technology in time.

Eric Stromquist
Well, what you made a statement to them wanted to visit before we came on the show, which is AI, artificial intelligence, is not going to be able to fix conventional controls. expand on that it’d be worth

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, okay. So today’s tech technology, let’s, let’s make it through the years, right. So we started, in fact, the sort of big players in the industry really all started out of the mercury switch thermostat days of the 1800s. And then we came up with

1800s.

And largely, you know, here’s the thing that people outside of our industry, when you tell them about what is the underlying technology, they’re a little shocked, right, we’re still largely using 1800s technology, we spice it up with a little 1930s technology, things like PID and simple algorithms. But when you look at the challenge, we have, we have these Foundation, this platform that itself fundamentally knows nothing about buildings, right? It’s nothing but a collection of sequences and set points and some p ID. You can’t with AI do what we would call introspect. You can’t look into that black box, and say, what’s in this building? How do I interact with it? What’s the importance of these different things in in the control scheme? How do they relate to each other? How they interconnected? How do they match the physical reality on the ground, and so long as you can’t do that, you doesn’t matter how much intelligence whether it’s AI or a whole team of engineers, it’s blind to the reality of the building. And so there’s very little you’re going to accomplish by trying to throw AI, on top of what we’d call a black box type control system. So you need to start thinking about well, how would I make the system know about buildings? How could it understand what buildings are, how buildings work, and how the systems work?

Ken Smyers
Very

well, that’s remarkable. You give because we have, we have made attempts with that idea of throwing AI on top of it, you know, and then, you know, just basically getting that you’re reading all the inputs, all the communications on networks, you know, whatever it is, it’s Abracadabra, and they can start making your diagnostics and then your fault detection possible through the metabolism, the metabolic rate of the building, you know, you know, things turning off and on and wheezing, and, you know, calling for heating and cooling same time and at the end some certain period of time, get a punch list of what’s what’s working and what’s not, you know, so I think what I hear you saying is, that’s really not going to work. I mean, it may work or you might get lucky, but that’s not the real answer.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, you’re sort of spinning the wheel and hoping. And so we started thinking, you know, okay, what are autonomous buildings? What, what does this mean, what is required. And so what’s required to get to that endpoint, that future place that we need to be as those need to be fully autonomous, that means in real time, make their own control decisions not be strapped down to some sequences that somebody hits five years ago, where a good idea for all time, and we can talk about why that’s fundamentally an impossible solution. They need to be able to add the system’s level intelligence, this organizing intelligence, all the things in a building, right. So when you have four zones next to each other, they can’t really be independently controlled, like we’re doing today. They are, in fact, they’re more dynamically connected. And yet our control systems know nothing about that. They need to be what we call self federating, which is you put them in buildings, and they know the equipment in the building the systems systems, the sensors, and being able to organize that together and themselves as controllers. What was up with one another for it was a term self What? Self federating? So it means that, you know, in passive logic, if you connect one, or 10, or 100 of our controllers together, they go find each other, and they say, Hey, guys, I see you, let’s work together, and let’s vote for a leader. And that leader can lead the system. And if somebody comes along with a big baseball bat and hits that leader, then they all say, hey, the leaders gone, number one’s gone. Hey, number 23. How about you be a leader? Right? So this self Federation is important for how do we make automation scalable? So it works at thousand square foot buildings, as well as million square foot buildings? Good?

Ken Smyers
Yeah. Good. Well, I was going to ask how

Eric Stromquist
hedge, you know, hedge is a relatively new concept or industry versus, you know, cow, how does that fit feed into the wholesale federating control scheme?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Right? So So edge is super important. You can’t fundamentally make autonomous buildings, it’s right in the name of autonomous, I’m run off the cloud. And here’s the problem, you know, that just that first fully autonomous, it needs to make control decisions in real time. That invalidates being with do this from the cloud, even the most connected buildings, as you guys all know, have outages on the connectivity. So if it’s getting all its control decisions from the cloud, well, what happens when it doesn’t have that connectivity. And most buildings don’t connectivity at all. And then in the middle of the buildings that are connected, you know, the connectivity is not as well good as we want. And even in the deepest part of Silicon Valley, you just have these windows of time, when you just don’t have connectivity. So resiliency, and buildings is important, it needs to be at the edge. The second thing is it needs to be real time. So let’s take this to the car world where they have a lot more speed requirements than we do. But we still have speed requirements, that if a Tesla autopilot, was driven by the cloud at the speed of light, getting back to the cloud, and back to the car, that cars driven 40 miles and hit a crowd of people, you can’t do the cloud. So one of the things about the edge is you need these things, you need resiliency, you need speed, the ability to real time, you need the ability to organize what’s happening in the building. And you can only see that if you’re in the building. And the edge, it’s really interesting, because we’re actually this is our second wave to the edge. So back in the 70s, and 60s, it was all about mainframe, that was the call, right? And then we moved to the edge in the 80s and 90s. With the personal computer, the internet came about and we said, Wow, we could just shove a bunch of personal computers in a big warehouse. And we went swung back to the cloud, because that was a little bit more cost effective. But what’s happening now is this phone has the same performance and power as the servers sitting in Amazon’s cloud. And it’s coming nearly for free. Right? And that, combined with the needs of AI needing to do these things on site in real time, is what’s driving this new edge technology.

Eric Stromquist
Very, very cool. Well, I want to shift gears a little bit because Contrary to popular belief, a digital twin is not what Kenny and I are people accuse us of being digital. But it seems like so much of your technology is sort of revolves around this digital twin concept. So for our community, would you explain your definition of digital twin and how you guys have incorporated it into your, your structure?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Right. So if we’re going to make bulletins, buildings, we have to start with the notion that the control system needs to know buildings needs to know buildings and Systems and how they work. And to do that, we took the notion of a digital twin, which many of the people listening may have heard a little bit about. Now usually, when you’re hearing digital twin, it’s kind of an it’s slightly evolved concept of cat or bem where you’re saying, Well, okay, this, here’s this device or object in in real space. And here’s a CAD model. But what we mean is this deep digital twin that understands its underlying physics. And to do that, this, this kind of control technology, we need a couple of things to happen. First, we need that the building of the automation system understands the underlying physics of what’s going on in the building, because that’s the fundamental right, that’s the fundamental thing that decides how we control anything, how we decide anything in a building is the physics of those objects. And the second thing, and it’s really important, the notion of control is we’re being asked to control all kinds of buildings, and all kinds of systems. And we need this ability to ad hoc design a system made of whatever components and equipment and it can figure out together how to control that topology.

Ken Smyers
Very cool. Do you have a visual you could show us on this planet? Yeah, let’s

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
let’s go through a couple of visuals on this because I think it will provide people with a little bit more context

of what we’re talking about. But very great definition. I love candy. I don’t know about you, man. I’m getting so much out of a royal

Ken Smyers
point of joy. We always give ourselves credit for finding seeking out the people that are going to change the industry. And that’s what control trends is all about, you know, finding the trends and the trendsetters and the trend trending in innovation and technology. I think we just come to a another realization there’s something really hot, heavier. That’s going to make an impact in our industry quickly. Right.

Eric Stromquist
Real quick. Now I see Roy, can you say Troy’s it, Royer?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, it’s Troy.

Eric Stromquist
Okay, my apologies.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Okay, you’re good.

We’re back I grew up with, I grew up with two brothers that all start with tea and it all gets mixed up. So

Eric Stromquist
this is a cool looks like you bring some good stuff up here. So let’s, let’s rock and roll what we have.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
So let’s just talk about what digital twins are. So digital twins enable what we call model based control. So when we look at how controls been done, the last hundred years, right, it’s a model free, there’s nothing in a thermostat or a key ID controller, or, or a your control platform that knows anything about the system it’s controlling. And we think the next hundred years, not just in buildings, but in all these different industries is really going to be about model based control where the control system understands the model of the system it’s working on. So what’s really exciting about digital twins is today, we have this growing stack of integration that we’re doing today. And it’s kind of interesting that in our industry, we call it integration, not installation. And it goes to where the work is all of this effort of just, you know, plugging things and Bolton things on. And we’re going to be able to replace all of this with the drawings you probably already have. Or if you don’t have them, they’re really easy to make. And likely you’re drawing them them yourself just to make the paper tell the guys in the field what they’re doing. So let’s look at how this works in terms of digital twin. So a digital twin is a copy of the real world. So here’s a pump, a digital twin is a virtual version, that pump. And it starts with this thing called an ontology. So this is somewhat of a nerdy term. But I’m going to, you know, define it basically as technological existentialism. How does a pump know what it is in the universe? You know, who am I? What I do, you know, this is thinking about how does it work in the universe. And, and that’s my made up of a bunch of components. So first is like, what is my taxonomy, right, I’m kind of transport a pump moves water from one place to another the way a conveyor belt moves, boxes are fed moves there. So that gives me some identity and global behavior. A pump knows where it is. And it’s ontology in the system, how it’s connected to everything that is connected to a pipe, and that pipes connected to boiler and the physics of all of those. It understands its location, and its spatial relationships to everything, and understands that underlying physics, you know, what do I do, it can simulate its own futures. Now, what’s important about the simulated zone future, and we’ll get into that is this notion of future forward control. But it also allows me to introspect, and introspect means I can look into all these variables and the pump, and know things about that pump, even without somebody having to set up analytics, or even without sensor information. That is direct, right? If certain items in the system or working in a certain way, well, I can infer certain variables that I don’t even have a sensor for, which is really cool. And all that gets collected up into the sort of organizational physics of that I can query. So it’s not just how do I simulate my futures, but in in reverse, I can look into aspects of how that pump behaves. And finally, what I think is really exciting, you mentioned this is, if you have this ontology, then we can talk a little bit more about the ontology, then you understand the fundamentals of what a pump does that I give a pump power, and that causes the rotor to spin, and that creates pressure. And that creates flow. And that interaction sort of global knowledge or meta knowledge allows you to more easily translate into different protocol semantics, right, because I can speak pump now more easily back net, or my bus or lawn or whatnot. But all these things, while it’s kind of sophisticated, get packaged up into this little container that just looks like a CAD symbol, and represents the kind of, you know, visualization, that one, the one that we’re used to in industry, right, a pump represents the pump zone represents a zone, and I don’t have this mismatch of trying to make a zone represent a PMD controller.

And once you connect them all together, they can now form whole systems that compute what that system behaves as. And then once it’s in your building, well, you have the advantage of all of the sensors telling you how its operating. So you can automatically regress to make sure they are matching the way the building actually behaves. And then finally, at any point in the operation, you can open up that that device and go introspect and create analytics automatically without effort without, you know, additional programming effort. And we can package this all together in a self formula, self validating package. So we’ve actually got an investment from the Department of Energy to build this transferable digital twin standard that we all can share, from architects to engineers, automation, guys, to the guys are maintained and managing our buildings to the utilities, who wants to do this sort of real time network. So we see this workflow, whether we’re doing it in our industry of now I can create what the system looks like, or I can get it from an architect or engineer. And now I’m getting digital work site guarantees, and the system can condition itself. And we know that its operating in a certain way against that design. Because it’s all one to one, it’s representing the objects we actually use. And then at the end of the day, the opportunity is working with utilities, we now can do things that were not very possible before because we can start working in real time between buildings and utilities, where the utilities can negotiate with the buildings and say, Hey, buildings, you know, or the next 12 hours, what are your loads going to be the they are, the utility can aggregate the information, say, Well, I’m going to buy power on the wholesale market that represents what my loads will be over time. And the reverse can say, hey, there’s a rate become it through clock in the afternoon, hey, buildings, how about you go navigate around that hours ahead of time, and I’ll give you some discount. But what we see that’s more powerful than this is that now you’ve got that platform to start going to the future of peer to peer energy networks, just like the internet works. That’s not the central utility and all the customers we can start working together in a more demand response peer to peer way.

Eric Stromquist
Geez. Okay, I’m almost speechless. But it seems like one of the ramification to this. Troy, is it your system? So my second PID loops up to commission the system? Is that accurate?

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, that’s accurate. So it’s important understand, when I show you say, the software, that we’re what we’re not generating is conventional control. And there’s a reason for this. We think that this, these conventional control ideas, like big loops, are actually causing a lot of the pain. Let’s think about the big loop for a moment, a simple simple case, where we have a rectangular single zone building. And we have one gap for that rectangular space, that’s as simple as it can be. Now, as a building physics modeler, having looked at even a simple singles on building, I know that the function of the ID system is basically a function of inside and outside temperature to how do I adjust the damper. But the function of building is incredibly complex, it has all of these assemblies, insulation, and break and inside drywall, and all sorts of walls and windows with, with radiant light coming through from the sun and the roof in the in the ground coupled to the earth. And when I modeled that, I couldn’t accurately model that with 100 PhDs, right? The idea is kind of a simple curve with this, you know, time variants, function, kind of hack on top. And ever, in Excel brought in a bunch of data and intake, an overly simplistic, where’s ration algorithm, like, polynomial to your data, know that it goes from clue and just like takes off and goes crazy. And you’re like, that doesn’t model my data? Well, that’s the key ID, we’re trying to jam this really complex model zone interest, very simple curve. So you know, the P ID, effectively is taking this incredibly complex model of the zones, physical behavior, with the occupancy, the weather, and all of its constructions and trying to jam it into a simple curve. And that’s fundamentally not possible. And as everybody who knows about tuning pod is, it’s also a little bit unstable. And so get into well, is really hard. And fundamentally, you know, maybe we could say impossible, because it’s just too simple of a regression of a zone. And as you build out more and more zones that are all interacting with each other, well just explodes and complexity. So we’re, we’re dealing with a problem right now, where our controls technology are such a poor match to what we’re trying to regress or what we’re trying to, to control.

Ken Smyers
Well, you know, I, again, I’m willing to I’m kind of spellbound here, because of the it looks like we’re at cross purposes, in many instances of our industry, right now, it’s good to get this enlightenment, because number one, we’re having trouble getting the talent, and it’s because of our profile. And our style, too, is that you know, we’re trying to to react all the time, like you said, that cycle, that cycle failure, you’re doing the complaint, a tweak, and then and then tune in and complete tweak and tune in that pretty well describes a lot of our world. But the the execution, or the getting the technology into play into our world is also a very good chance, because you have a bunch of barriers, you have a lot of, as you call them, the senior citizens in our industry have have very strong holds on the channels of content contractors through the distributors, and to the OEM and to the business. building owners. Yep. So so what we’re seeing is the internet was the great free or you know, emancipated all this information, you don’t ask for permission anymore. But I think the big question here is how how does past of logic see itself going to market now and of the year and then in the future to come? Is it gonna be what just tell us about that.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
So one of the things that we see in the marketplaces, there’s these players at multiple levels. So you’ve got the the installer level, and you’ve got the master integrator level, and you have the wholesale distribution level. And then we have all of these different people throughout the building chain, and who are really sort of driving some of the thinking, whether it’s engineers or architects or the maintenance management, about what solutions go into buildings. But what we saw is, what’s interesting about buildings is this interesting inverted value chain. Now this is really different from other markets. So when we say there is an inverted value chain, what it means is that while there’s a lot of billion dollars at the top, right, you might have big rates or big corporations, that money usually trickles down from Okay, the owner calls an architect to cause an engineer who calls a general contractor called a subcontractor who goes to distribution house and negotiates for what he’s going to buy about across the counter. And then the guy in the truck is the one who’s the fundamental customer. Well, here’s, here’s what’s the disconnect we see in new technologies, usually, the new technology is trying to sell to the top of the market. Lucas don’t buy product, right? The guy who’s actually installing it in a building is the one deciding product. So we recognize early and pathologic, well, this is pretty disruptive technology, how can we use the technology to address the pain points of the installer, because they’re the ones often making the decision, especially in the design build market, which is fundamentally way bigger than the plan spec market, in terms of number of commercial building units out there. So we think that there’s an opportunity here to use technology to not only align the reality of the new world where people are buying stuff online, together with the importance of the territorial distribution system. And so our go to market is largely through territorial distributor, a distribution territorial distribution, the the master integrators, and then bringing into the fold these h back installers and H back technicians who can now start bubbling up from the bottom of the market and replacing their thermostatic that they’re using today with real passive logic controls.

Eric Stromquist
Well, yeah, let’s talk about your products. What you know, we’ve talked about the technology, the wonder the actual products.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, so our core product is our control unit. And, you know, maybe a bit good before we jump in to the hardware and take a look, let’s let’s bring up another visual here. Okay, so fundamentally, what is passive logic. So what we see passive logic is as a software platform that’s built on this digital twin workflow that takes us from the whole design, build, operate, maintain manage lifecycle of how we interact with buildings, then we’re talking about the solutions for the whole value chain. But again, we see the installers, the fundamental customer and buildings. And so we’ve wrapped this all up into this control system, that we’ve used this new way of thinking about how do we do automation to rethink? How do we make hardware? How do we make product that exposes that new way of thinking to the automation installer? So what passive logics platform looks like we’re taking that digital twin the deep integration, it’s all put right into the control system. And this platform is what we think of as integrating this whole slew of things where we’re doing integrate, just like, you know, your iPhone, again, that that example, why did the smartphone market in four years replace the sales of the home computer market of 40 years in terms of units sold? Well, it’s because of integration, right? And we can now enable that integration, because the digital twins give us a level of knowledge that we can put all this into one package, together with what you know, represents 2019 electronics. And so what we see with our pathologic control system is we’ve got built in networking that doesn’t need any external devices built in analytics built in the can, every box in our systems, effectively the head of the system, you have built in portfolio management, smart IO, the issue tracking. And what we think is more interesting beyond just the integration of existing concepts, is these new technologies that just weren’t possible before. So control auto pilot, universal protocol, translation, automate point mapping, on me the commission, true human physiology based Comfort Control, and this demand response with utilities. So I’ll switch here to our, our visuals, and I’ll just actually to pick up our control platform. So what’s interesting about what we realized with the control platform, is we put a screen right on it, because we knew that we could do that guided installation. And what we saw early on is this is where all these automation projects were falling down, like the lowest paid guy in the field, would switch to wires and screw it up for a day, a week, a month, and nobody knows going on. So we made it. So the screen actually just slid right up and gave you a What you see is what you get view of your points. You have modular points, right? So that you can decide what points and how many points and you can just put it up to eight modules that it gives you 48 points in one box. And this box has all the intelligence on board. So all intelligence is back here, all of your connectivity or internet, Wi Fi, Bluetooth, everything built on board, and you just supply it with 120 power. And it’s going to generate all of its power internally and distributed throughout the box. So it’s better to think of this not so much as a controller, but a whole panel, because we’re generating that 24 volt AC right on board that, you know 50 VA that’s usually that big giant transformer, we have an electronic inverter that does that same thing and about a square inch of space. And then when you put these modules inside, well, they’re just distributing all that power, the distributing, whether it’s high voltage, low voltage, all the control, communication, right to the smart modules that each module each point is again, providing built in line testing, built in power monitoring for every point so that when you hook up a pump or hook up there, Mr or hook up some kind of sensor, will we go and test that line is day? Well? Is that what it looks like? Is it really that thermosphere in the field? Or is there actually an RTD? Or with the line cross, you know, short circuited or open circuit and we do that real time testing give you live feedback right here?

Ken Smyers
Question. And that’s because that’s extraordinary. It’s remarkable. It’s compact, the idea of putting the you know, the face, the troubleshooting panel on to the actual controller is just far out. And, and again, because this is going to help our industry step forward across all those chasms, all the barriers of entry, are being eliminated, until we start talking about the engineering tool, the input output, and then we put it all together. So that’s, that’s what I’m holding my breath for now.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Yeah, so well. So what’s one other aspect of this that is worth mentioning is, once you put the screen on it, we realized that we could do some new things with control. Because today, what we were finding, we are home running all this wiring back to back closet and the basement. And it was a lot of work. And once we put the screen on it, we said well, gosh, this is not just the engineering tool and the guidance for installation. But we can now make it a user access point. And so we make it so flanges into a wall. And so you have the ability instead of surface mounting this in your mechanical room, flange into any drywall wall. And now putting your automation controls wherever they’re convenient for picking up sensors, picking up controls, and then leaving in place that user access point. So we found that was reducing our wiring by about two x. And so that’s sort of a neat benefit of like, Okay, how do we make both the user the installer and the control technology all come together?

Ken Smyers
The reduction of wiring by two x also, you’re also that user access point is always been a nightmare, because we always had to have display modules everywhere. Right? And then And then the final questions curious about is with the sensors and everything. I was two times this week, I’ve been out with a major player and going into potential customers, and we’re selling, you know, technology. And and and so if I looked at that, that submission of technology and this one here, I’m concerned a little bit because this thing seems to be much more advanced. But how is it to? We’re seeing a desire for IP networks, IB controllers, IoT devices versus the MSRP. That’s, you talk about things going away quickly. That’s one of the ones fastest one, I can see where there’s been a preference for IP controllers versus whatever. Yeah, we have our issues with cyber security, where we’re trying to, there’s two ways really to generalize how to do it either get on the enterprise network, or you have your own building, system network, but we’re seeing people shifting to a building systems network. So I’d be curious what your thoughts are on that, that issue. And then finally, the sensor consolidation. We saw a presentation where one sensor had eight different sensors in it, it was in the ceiling mount. So it provided everything from thermal imaging, you know, occupancy, you know, pressure, temperature, you know, just the whole thing, humanity, I mean, all in co2, I mean, and so we’re seeing as architects and things we used to sell, are being reduced into very incredibly sophisticated components. So the big question was, if you lose one, do you lose them all? And what if somebody you know, so Leisha distribution seemed like you have this additional Lifeline? You know, and then finally, was, if you’re, and I don’t think you have that problem, but the questions that you intelligent users are finding out is how, if we lose the cloud, if we’re losing network, where are we at, we have standalone operations that are going to make dang Sure, we’re going to maintain this hospital or this Intensive Care Unit, or, you know, those sorts of things.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Right. So I think there’s a few things there. So one on on the privacy. So one of the things that we really focus on is this system, you daisy chain, you make, you know, whatever, spanning tree or ring networks, you don’t need any external equipment, it will just work on its own. And it doesn’t have to, you know, be part of that existing network. And then you can branch out to the outside world, however you want from one of the controllers. So by nature were private. By nature, like we said, we’re edge based, right? So we’re not dealing with all this information shuttling back and forth between us and the cloud, though we do have a cloud that provides you a whole portfolio management. But we think that that privacy, and that security is a really key part of how we go forward. If you don’t have the ability to Wired infrastructure, the system will actually Wi Fi mesh on its own, again, without any other routers, or, or network equipment. When we get down to the control points, you know, you’re talking about these different kinds of systems where we think the legacy is just not going away. And yet, there’s this proliferation of new, different protocols, right. And so in our market in the commercial market, we have some lock that there’s a lot of consolidation around things like back now. But we’re being asked to more and more IoT, which is going to bring in other protocols. And those protocols just keep on compounding. And we can talk a little bit right after this on on that topic, because I think it’s useful to understand the difference between these different protocol stacks. But each one of these modules, they’re smart on their own. So every point could be MSRP, could be zero to 10 volts in or out could be current in or out, it could be 24 volts AC out, it auto switches its power, you can talk a variety different protocols that we’ve made these things super universal, and you can have them right in the control system. Or you can what we call free range modules, put them in a little controller that daisy chains off or can be wireless. So we have this both a Bluetooth and a and a Wi Fi mesh where these guys Bluetooth mesh from that same device.

Eric Stromquist
Troy we gotta stop you did because our industry Hey, there too many people that are out there crying right now. You know, we’ve been going in our is fantastic. Is it possible? And we’ll give you a chance to sort of wrap up and summarize

Ken Smyers
it real quick, where’s the antenna for that mesh and stuff is it can’t be internal to it, you have to have some ugly antenna hanging there.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
Its internal to it. And you know, we like little sensors internal to it. So they, they, they all work together.

Eric Stromquist
Wow, wow. Well, listen. Yeah, I want I want to give you a chance to my But my question is, can we get you to come back on? I know, you’re busy. But we’d love to come back on in two, three weeks, four weeks, whatever. And, and I think just deserves, you gotta know, you got a lot more. Yeah, we’re just sort of iceberg here. But anything any final things you sort of want to wrap up with it? And last question.

Troy Harvey Passive Logic
I think what will be exciting for maybe in the future is it take people how this works on the ground, take them through the software pop pipeline of how this changes, not only how we automate, but our workflow of automation, which we think really simplifies it for the guys who are doing the business of automation. But what you know, the takeaway should really be is there’s new technologies. They do feel like a step function to the guys in the ground when we’re like saying, you know, today, but we want to make sure that people know that this is a magic box. That step function was the result of years of hard work of a lot of people taking what is possible with current technology and inventing something special for our market, due to the unique opportunities that we have in the building space.

Eric Stromquist
Very, very cool. I’m assuming passive dash logic calm is the best website for people to connect. It is. Alright, brother, thanks so much.

Ken Smyers
Thank you. Thanks for

Eric Stromquist
Kenny’s Smyers. What did you think?

Ken Smyers
Well, I tell you what I had to I had, you know, I was so impressed what an amazing concept with an amazing intelligent person that really under stands our industry as well as we do and brings more technology into it. And again, you know, we could be across purposes unintentionally. Of course, for a lot of the reasons we might be our own worst enemy of bringing new people into our world because of like, again, we don’t have that dismiss the cognitive dissonance, I’m gonna have to read up and studied more about that but the impression you make on young people where they come into a factory or they come into a vendor or these facilities are not the same as I versions of what we see and what we think is you know, cool, clever, smart and whatever could be off can be skewed considerably to attract the most intelligent people that are available. But I thought one thing particular was that thing with that app coming to work with the initiative to create a new application that you could give high fives on versus you know, keeping a quiet day because everybody’s been complaining and moaning about this didn’t get done or having issues with integration whatever that concept that mentality for young person is just not gonna work.

Eric Stromquist
Yeah, yeah, no, I got you I got it. So for all our younger folks in the industry out there Kenny are giving digital High Five right now great job Keep up the good work and but anything else before we hop off man we got to the nomination ballot should be coming out the first week in October which is coming up for the control trends awards. There’s still a few sponsorships left to take all the platforms are gone but I think we have some golds and silvers and maybe maybe a bronze left so but that’s filling up so we should be sold out here in the next I’d say two weeks.

Ken Smyers
Thank you very much for all the sponsors that man I just know they’re all just great you know proponents they get behind control trends because what what I think some of the things we’re doing but this event is going to be just a great episode again it’s gonna be a great summary of our 2019 is going to be a lot of you know, just who’s who the industry is going to be there.

Eric Stromquist
Okay, there you go. Man us another week on control, talk management and video cast and podcast a special special thanks to our guest this week. Troy Harvey from passive logic good stuff there. And you know, so we’re that remember, be bold, staying control, high five, the younger person because Troy says that’s what makes him See you next week on control talk now.

Ken Smyers
Indeed,

Eric Stromquist
indeed. Kenny Smyers

Transcribed by https://otter.ai