Welcome to the lab.
Products that reached the market, prototypes that didn't pass the tests, ideas that never left the whiteboard, plenty of failures that helped me grow, and plenty of real satisfactions too.
These projects fed the product lines of several companies: the historic Threads.it SRL and, today, Pulse SRL and Strega Byte SRL.
Some projects I came up with and work on today, with Strega Byte SRL, Pulse SRL and partner companies.
Strega Byte's managed firewall (an innovative startup from Benevento, where I'm the CEO): for offices and small businesses, it closes the network to whatever isn't needed and only speaks up when it matters, in plain language.
Pulse's agriculture platform: a digital field log (TerraBook), decision support (TerraDSS), an AI agronomist, satellite indices and in-house measuring stations. Born from the STEALTH project, ranked second of about 900 companies at Campania Startup 2023.
Virtual employees for business processes: AI agents that handle mail, documents, paperwork and deadlines, with people always in charge.
Innovative educational building blocks for inclusive learning: a kit to build letters by hand, with cards and QR codes that open a web app and videos. Build, learn, grow, have fun.
Digital inspections for museums, historic sites and cultural heritage: configurable checklists, an offline app, automatic reports.
Buyers and suppliers connected by AI: search with a prompt, profiles optimised for AI engines too.
Air quality for livestock and industrial sites: CO₂, temperature and humidity, a web app and notifications. Inside a case designed and 3D-printed in-house.
Real estate crowdfunding on blockchain: invest in a property even with small digital shares, returns are paid out automatically and the technology stays invisible to investors.
The app for Italians learning Spanish: visual micro-lessons built on the typical mistakes Italian speakers make (false friends, calques, grammar interference), an adaptive path that focuses where you actually go wrong, and 10 minutes a day. Next step: AI-powered conversation practice.
Where I come from: hardware, firmware, research, products. Some reached the market, others stopped earlier. All of them taught me something.
A computer inside a cow's stomach
A system to catch metabolic imbalances in cattle and buffalo before they become diseases. An endoruminal probe measures pH and temperature and radios them to a sensor network in the barn; decision-support software alerts the farmer. Threads designed the probe: hardware, firmware and radio.
A Campania Region (POR 2000-2006) project with Engisud and the Engineering Department of the University of Sannio.
The probe had to live inside the animal for years on a lithium battery, transmit through fluid and tissue, and not bother anyone. We tested the radios underwater, by hand, metre by metre.
Giving nature a voice
Monitoring and Alert of the Hydrologic Slope Hazard: rods with four patented sensors pushed into the ground measure suction, water content and temperature at different depths, together with rainfall. The T-node, our in-house datalogger, collects the data; the Service Centre reconstructs how the hillside responds and alerts civil protection, authorities and citizens.
Two patents, a dedicated company (iMahsh Trade Italia, 2012) and a pilot installation in Vico Equense.
A hole one and a half centimetres wide instead of the fifteen needed by traditional sensors. Solar-powered stations, data over GPRS, in places where you had to go looking for signal.
A hillside under watch
A platform to collect and analyse environmental data from low-power measuring stations, with alert thresholds. It monitored a landslide-prone slope along the railway in Vico Equense: the test bench iMahsh grew out of.
The first warning system, where it all began.
We overlaid susceptibility maps on satellite photos by hand. Google Earth was a novelty.
Your home, run from your phone
Home automation, homemade in the literal sense: a Wi-Fi node we designed controls shutters, lights, irrigation and heating, with an Android app and a communication protocol written from scratch. It also became a university thesis.
Working prototype, later also studied for crowdfunding.
You couldn't buy a smart home at the supermarket. You designed the board, wrote the protocol and hoped the shutters wouldn't open by themselves at 3 a.m.
Certified inspections, before smartphones
Systems to collect inspection checklists in the field (hygiene, maintenance, food safety) and to certify the distribution of advertising flyers, with date, time and place. Used in retail and food, they later became T-inspection.
Threads.it's first product, also developed with an analysis laboratory.
PDAs with a stylus, tablet PCs the size of a tray, syncing over a cable. And it worked.
Oxygen for water treatment plants
Smart control of water treatment plants based on dissolved oxygen: a dedicated board with sensor firmware, local storage and data transmission over GSM.
A project with a development plan and budget, ancestor of Aqua Veritas and Pulse.
The Raspberry Pi had just come out and it felt like a supercomputer.
An Early Warning System for rain-triggered landslides: patented sensors in the ground measure suction, water content and pore pressure, the T-node transmits and a service centre alerts Civil Protection and citizens before the slope gives way.
WhatsApp customer engagement for companies talking to thousands of users: machine-learning chatbots, sentiment analysis and an operator console. Transferred to set up a new company.
The digital twin of an artwork, tied to a handful of NFTs: owners visit the work in virtual reality and generate AI reinterpretations of it.
An app and 3D game for primary-school learning, designed above all for children with learning differences, together with the Neuroscience Department of the University of Trieste.
At Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Irpinia section: a real-time charting platform for GNSS stations, put into production, and anomaly detection models for earthquakes and volcanoes.
Digital lotteries on smart contracts: certified, tamper-proof draws and resellable NFT tickets.
Rehabilitation exercises tracked by Kinect and wearable sensors, with a remote physiotherapist and a game-like approach.
Pulse's 3D printing and IoT assembly unit. Among its work, 3D models for a tourism project in Benevento.
Automatic check-in for B&Bs: a connected key box, an app and the cloud. The guest arrives at midnight, the owner sleeps.