My Little Beacon
A compact, affordable GSM device so children can reach their emergency contacts at a press.
A small device for young children to reach their emergency contacts without a phone in their pocket. Working directly with the founder as the embedded lead, the brief was to get the pre-production prototype to a point where call quality was reliable enough to ship.
“The hardware has to get out of the way so the parent doesn't notice it.”
Most of the work sat in the audio chain: microphone capture, digital processing, cellular transmission, and speaker output. Getting that chain to deliver clean voice calls end-to-end meant configuring the onboard audio codec, cellular module, and system clocking. Real-time signal processing included an adaptive filter for acoustic echo cancellation running on a resource-constrained microcontroller; call quality was then validated on live hardware, and power-delivery failures on the cellular module were traced to component-level root cause.