From Idea to Market - Story of Magicbit

We see problems in the world everyday. Solving a problem could be a quite satisfying thing for anyone. I believe that the innovation is the only way out of big problems man kind face such as climate change, pollution, poverty, unemployment, starvation & etc. That’s why we need more and more technical innovations. This is the story of idea to market of Magicbit, a unique single board computer to solve a set of long lasting problems in Ed-Tech sector and innovation.

Magicbits Assemble

Good friends lead us to good deeds. Anuruddha, Akalanka and myself (Migara) were batchmates in University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka. Moratuwa university is widely regarded as the best technical university in the country and we three studied electronics and telecommunication engineering there. Incase you are wondering where Sri Lanka is, you can find it just below India. It’s an island nation with nice tropical weather.

We were good friends before becoming business partners. After the graduation we worked in different engineering fields. Anuruddha in research and development side, Akalanka in product development & IT side and I worked in Telco sector. Anuruddha being the most innovative person out of all, was bold enough to step out of the corporate job to form his own electronic R & D firm in 2016. Knowing each other from 2008, our friendship age more than 12 years.

Exposure to Industry 4.0

Being engineers by profession we had the burning desire to create new things ( Or may be after watching ironman movie many times). We were passionate about introducing new technology like Internet of Things(IoT), robotics and automation to solve some of the burning issues faced by industries in Sri Lanka. This led to introducing NBIoT and LoRA applications to industries in Sri Lanka which is a pioneering move by our team.

industrial Internet of Things IIoT Things Node smart gateways industry 4.0 — Industry 4.0 solutions by Magicbit team

Educational Platforms

While developing new innovative solutions we identified the knowledge gap in the society in the technology side and even in the workforce of companies.

On the other hand, we received requests from educational institutes and universities to manufacture development boards and software for students to learn and practice new technologies. So Anuruddha being the hardware hacker, designed a series of development boards to cater these requirements. The names given to these boards were the names of Lord of the Rings series such as Gandalf, Boromir & etc ( We had to name like that as we were die hard Lord of the Rings fans ).

Problem identification

During this period we identified some of the issues in development boards and innovation with technology. Most of the platforms available had below drawbacks.

Low end or limited number of features
Need lot of components to create different solutions
Complex and difficult to understand for beginners
Spend most of the time connecting wires, jumpers, breadboards and soldering rather than developing solution logic
Not easy to use and less attractive for learners
Hardships in starting innovation with minimum coding knowledge
Costly to make applications when buying many different components

Solution

This is where our team thought of developing a solution for this problem. We had number of different features in mind for this one platform to rule them all.( Like the one ring to rule them all in Lord of the Rings)

Feature rich — We wanted to include all sensors, actuators, communications and other modules required to develop an innovation in a single platform.
Easy to use — We wanted to have plug and play sensor modules and eliminate the traditional jumper wires and breadboards.
Visual Code builders — We wanted to integrate a visual code building IoT platform to start developing solutions even with minimum coding knowledge.
Cross platform support —We wanted to link our platform with all popular software platforms at the time like Arduino, Scratch (The Scratch Team), nanoFramework(C#), Platform IO, Node.js, Python& etc.
Beginner to expert — While showing an easy path to start off, we never wanted to limit innovators and wanted to develop a platform even suitable for experts.

We researched over two years to come up with a robust, high quality, long lasting and cost effective solution with hardware, software and mobile integration to meet our list of objectives.

We named this hexagonal shape development board as ‘Magicbit’.

What is Magicbit?

Magicbi is an all in one development board for electronics, robotics, IoT ( Internet of Things), programing and AI ( Artificial Intelligence). It’s a perfect development board for innovations with technology for students, developers, tech-enthusiasts, hobbyists or anyone. Magicbit is a feature rich STEM education tool as well. Now Magicbit has hardware, software and even a mobile app providing the perfect environment for limitless innovations.

Magicbit is supported by many organizations, platforms and partners.

Team Magicbit

There were many young brilliant individuals joined with us at different stages of this journey. They all well contributed for the project Magicbit and without them this project will not be a success.

Awards & Recognition

During the last 2 years , Magicbit has been recognized with over 10 national level awards and received recognition in international events in Ed-tech and community service sectors.

International events

Winner of the Ed-Tech category of Common Wealth Digital Health Innovation Awards 2020, GenevaSwitzerland
Winner of the Misfits 2020 -Start up pitching competition organized by Vruksh Ecosystem, India in South Asian Region I
Winner of the Oslo Innovation Week Sri Lankan chapter competition 2020
Semi finalist in the pitching competition by Dongsheng International Incubator, BeijingChina
Represented Sri Lanka in Asia Pacific ICT Awards 2019, Vietnam

Events in Sri Lanka

Gold medal at National Inventors Exhibition 2019
Winner in Education in Inclusion and Community Service category — NBSQA 2019
Special Award for Most innovative & Best Solution using Internet of Things Technology — NBSQA 2019
Certified as a ‘A Grade’ product by BCS
Winner in education category in e-Swabhimani 2019
Winner of the Best Digital product in Zero One Awards 2020 organized by Sri Lanka Telecom
Runners Up in the Community Service Sector Awards in Zero One Awards 2020 organized by Sri Lanka Telecom
Runners Up in Best Startup Product/Service in SLASSCOM Innovation Awards 2020

Importance and relevance

We think that innovation with these new technologies are relevant not only to people in technical field but also in every field in future as the industries are increasingly transformed by these technologies leading to the next industrial revolution called industry 4.0. We believe we need to share this knowledge with everyone around the world. This is why we have made this knowledge freely available in our website for anyone interested.

Buy a MAGICBIT for you

Magicbit is a great tool to bring your ideas to life. Specially your innovative ideas with technology. You can build your dream project while solving a problem in the world using Magicbit.

Gift a MAGICBIT

We all know children today are good at tech. Their interest is normally directed to mobile phones, gaming & etc. What if, we can direct this tech-enthusiasm of children for innovation? Magicbit is the best choice for this. On the other hand you can gift a Magicbit for a friend, husband or wife to give them an opportunity to explore creativity.

“Our passion is to create smart innovators for the future and we are on a mission to ignite the spark of creativity around the world with Magicbit.”

Thanks for all who supported for the amazing journey of Magcibit.