Nodes cast into concrete and asphalt, powered by the traffic that crosses them, forming a mesh that watches the structure and hands its log to whatever drives over it.
Harvest where the load already is. A piezoelectric layer under the wearing course converts the micro-deflection of every axle into a regulated pulse. The traffic that damages the structure is also what pays for watching it.
Send the signal through the material. Cured concrete and wet aggregate kill ordinary radio. Smart-Matter uses low-frequency magnetic induction and sub-GHz propagation with no external antenna, hopping node to node along the deck.
Let the vehicles carry the log. Nothing is wired back to an office. Nodes commit signed structural records to a dead-drop ledger, and a passing vehicle with the right key syncs them over near-field — so inspection stops being an appointment.
The embedded side: harvesting, sampling, radio, and a bootloader that survives a 50-year maintenance horizon.
Hop-by-hop routing through the material, with sub-GHz scheduling for the traffic that passes.
Tamper-evident structural records, chained and signed, waiting for the next vehicle to collect them.
Provisioning and a simulator for mesh behaviour before anything is poured.
| Characteristic | Conventional visual inspection | Smart-Matter |
|---|---|---|
| interval | every 2 to 5 years, by people on site | continuous, from inside the material |
| disruption | lane or structure closed to inspect it | none — inspection while in service |
| coverage | whatever is visible from the surface | strain at 2,400 points per kilometre |
| record | a report filed by the inspector | signed log the next vehicle collects |
git clone https://github.com/KELLERBABG/Smart-Matter.git cd Smart-Matter && cargo test --workspace
Scope. A development workspace with firmware, mesh and simulation crates. No installation of this exists in a road, and the structural claims are modelled rather than measured.