Credit-card-sized. USB-C powered. Ruggedly built around two well-known modules: an ESP32-S3 MCU with an RGB status LED and a cellular base with a global SIM. It fits in a panel, a wall mount, or on a bench.
Tick is built on commodity, well-supported hardware. No mystery silicon. No vendor lock-in.
An ESP32-S3 with built-in WiFi, a single front button, and a single WS2812 RGB LED. No screen, no app — the LED color tells you what the device is doing from across a warehouse aisle. State lives in the cloud, not on a tiny display.
An NB-IoT/LTE-M modem on its own carrier board, with a SIM slot and an SMA antenna connector. Auto-detects the hardware revision so devices roll out across multiple production runs.
A standard pay-as-you-go IoT SIM ships pre-installed. Works in 200+ countries on partner carriers. Swap to your own carrier’s SIM and Tick adapts automatically.
Built for places where someone might have to debug it standing on a roof.
Five colors, no manual: white while booting, green when idle and healthy, blue mid-check-in, purple during OTA, red on error. Tells you the device’s state from across a warehouse aisle — no screen, no app needed.
A single front button for the moments you need it — long-press for a forced check-in, hold to reboot. Most operators never touch the button or a serial cable; the dashboard tells you everything the device knows.
A 64KB flash partition records up to 1024 structured errors with timestamp, source, severity, and context. Survives reboot and reflash. Every check-in carries a breadcrumb to the portal so a remote operator can drill in.
A second 64KB flash partition holds up to 3,840 unsent readings (~64 hours at one-minute records, ~26 days at ten-minute). When the network is down, telemetry stays on the device. When it’s back up, the device drains the backlog oldest-first.
Every device is identified by a string derived from its hardware. Reflash, factory-reset, replace the SIM — the same physical device is the same identity. No re-registration, no claim flow gone wrong.
Plug it into any USB-C power source: wall adapter, PoE splitter, vehicle charger, battery bank. The same device works on a kitchen counter, a refrigerator truck, or an off-grid pump house.
Tick ships with a built-in temperature sensor as a self-monitoring metric. External sensors are coming in production runs.
Today: the device’s own temperature, which is enough to demonstrate the platform end-to-end and prove a deployment is alive.
Next: external probes, starting with a 1-Wire temperature probe (the kind used in fridges, freezers, food trucks). Cheap, accurate, waterproof variants exist. The data path doesn’t change — the same dashboard, the same alerts, the same routes out to your destinations.
If you need a different probe: humidity, current, pressure, contact, pulse-counting — tell us during pilot. We’ll spec the integration.
A dev-board form factor works for pilots. For production, every detail matters — we spec it with you.
For the first ten devices in a customer’s hands, the bare board with USB-C power is fine: it boots, it reports, you see data. For ten thousand, it isn’t.
Production deployments need an enclosure (waterproof if outdoor), mounting (magnet, screw, or zip-tie), a clear label with serial and claim instructions, and a one-page quickstart card so the person installing the device doesn’t need a phone call from us.
That’s a cost-of-goods conversation, and we have it once a real prospect’s requirements are on the table. Email sales when you’re ready to talk specifics.