TECHNICAL MEMORANDUM                                          TM-26-002

SUBJECT:      The company that started as 29 lamps on a floor map
DATE:         2026-07-09


SUMMARY. In May 2015 I helped build an art installation at the
re:publica conference in Berlin: 29 lamps on a painted map of Europe,
each glowing in the live daylight color of a country, fed by
battery-powered sensors we had mailed to volunteers across the EU.
It looked like a toy. It was a field course in distributed systems,
and it turned into nine years of company-building.

1. BACKGROUND. Stephan Noller had just founded UBIRCH and wanted to
show what "Internet of Things" means when the things are actually
distributed - not on a lab bench, but in strangers' homes, in other
countries, behind other networks. The build: autonomous light
sensors (an Atmel 328, a GSM modem, a battery) mailed to hosts in
every EU member state, each reporting local daylight to a lamp on a
six-by-six-meter floor map at STATION-Berlin. I came in to help
build it.

2. FINDINGS.

   2.1 A sensor you mail away has no remote hands. No shell, no
   reflash, no "turn it off and on again". Power budget and radio
   behavior had to be right before the box was taped shut -
   low-power modes stretched one battery past a month.

   2.2 Logistics failed before the electronics did. More than ten
   sensors never reached their hosts; one is, as far as I know,
   still lost in China. No firmware update fixes shipping.

   2.3 Provisioning is a single point of failure - twice. First,
   every sensor went dark at once: the provider had deactivated our
   SIM cards by accident. Stephan solved that one with phone calls,
   not code. Then the lamps' GSM modules refused the network on the
   venue floor - probably a stale status cache; I fixed it hours
   before the doors opened by short-circuiting the powered-down
   boards.

   2.4 The lamps ran the same hardware plus an RGB LED, on concrete
   bases Stephan had poured himself, each with the host's country
   and coordinates embedded. Visitors could recolor Europe by
   tweeting at it. The fun part took days; keeping 29 embedded
   devices alive on a conference floor took everything else.

3. CONCLUSIONS. The distance between a prototype and a deployed
system is not computational, it is operational: shipping,
provisioning, power, and the absence of remote hands. An art
project is the best possible way to learn this - nobody gets hurt,
and everybody is watching.

4. ACTION. During the build, Stephan asked me to join the freshly
founded UBIRCH. I said yes; the paperwork made it co-founder and
CTO in 2016. Nine years of trust infrastructure followed, ending
with a backend that issued 350 million vaccination certificates.
The line from the lamps to the certificates is shorter than it
looks: assume no remote hands, and respect the parts of the system
that are made of cardboard, contracts, and SIM cards. The lamps
outlived the conference - two years later some of the originals
were sold to fans.