Steve Rogerson walked the aisles at last week’s Embedded World in Nuremberg.

When Germany’s Embedded World trade show started up again in June last year after Covid, there was a lot of nervousness as companies cautiously dipped their toes in the Nuremberg water. Last week, when the show had its second post-pandemic outing, the confidence was back, and in abundance.

Just walking round the halls – 20,000 steps a day is easy on these occasions – one could see and feel that business was returning to normal. OK, there were still not massive amounts of companies from the Far East, but some were there, a lot more than in June. And those that were there, from wherever in the world, reported a surge in engineers with real projects looking for real technology, what has always been the foundation for this annual event.

“A lot are coming here with a deep technology knowledge,” said Stefan Koltes, sales director of Fibocom Wireless, when I dropped in on the company’s stand. “A lot are very unsure about which technology they want to use, so are looking for a good hands-on experience. We are positive about the quality of leads. They are coming with new ideas, new applications. The industry is growing. We are going back to what it was like before Covid. Nobody is scared of a new lockdown as we saw last year. It is really back to a normal Embedded World.”

Raquel Arribas from Ignion said her mission at the show was to make the IoT simpler. The company set up a tablet on its stand that let engineers put in details of a project and receive a report about the project’s antenna needs.

“It is very exciting for people because they can solve their problems in minutes,” she said. “People are surprised because usually antenna design is tough. But we make it simple.”

She said the show went well and had been really busy.

Igor Micic, a field application engineer at Quectel, said the questions the company were seeing at the stand were more technical than they had been at Electronica in Munich in November.

“We are seeing different people to those who go to Electronica,” he said. “It has been very busy.”

He said the message that Quectel could provide a full service for people went down well. If there were problems, it meant the company’s engineers could deal with it around the world.

“If there is a problem, we have a full view of the issue,” he said. “We don’t want to play ping-pong with our customers. We can do all the trouble-shooting for them. We develop the project with them, so we know what they need and what they are using. We have a presence all over the world.”

As an example, he said if a customer in Australia had a problem, Quectel had engineers in Australia that could replicate the problem.

“If it is doable, we can do it,” he said. “Most of the questions we are getting at the show are about power consumption and timescales. They rely on us to help with the design of their device.”

Similarly, Carmen Redondo from Kyocera AVX, said her company worked with customers to design the whole product.

“We can cover different applications,” she said. “The show has been very good with a lot of visitors. For IoT, a lot of customers have issues. They don’t know what to do with antennas and come to us too late.”

She said the company had an online facility where customers can put in details of the project and whose modules they were using, and it would recommend which antennas would fit. At the other end of a project, it also has its own test chambers to help with final approval.

“We go right from concept to final approval,” she said.

At the show, she said they were seeing engineers with real projects who were searching for antennas.

“It was very busy,” she said.

One of the highlights of the show for me was a discussion panel on IoT organised by the IoT M2M Council (IMC). This was led by Fred Yentz, CEO of IoT Launch, who reminded the audience that all these engineers who were familiar with the embedded industry might not be experts in the IoT, particularly the security aspects and that there were opportunities for providing consultancy and advice, something that could be a “game changer”.

This was a perfect message for the second panellist, Nils Gerhardt, CTO of Utimaco, a specialist in cyber security. He said the key was to integrate security early into the design as that should mean fewer problems later on.

“Security is required,” he said. “It is a must that you think about security.”

He said the company could sometimes help add security using software later but then that knowledge should be used when designing future products.

The third panellist was Jörg Wolf, digital business consultant at A¹ Digital, who also said too often they were called in later rather than earlier in the design process. This was a problem, he said, because engineers may not know all the limitations as designs become more complex.

I hate tempting fate, but it really does seem as if the worst is now over and we can all go back to normal with busy, bustling trade shows where ideas and projects are planned and developed. This was my second big trade show of the year – after Automotive World in Tokyo in January – and the buzz just keeps getting louder. Fingers crossed this continues.