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UWB / BLE selectable · Custom device · POS integration

Order at the counter. Sit anywhere. The meal finds you.

A table flag engineered by Fluidity for BlueCats — selectable UWB or BLE radio, POS integration and cook-time-aware delivery tracking, live in more than one hundred venues across Australia.

100+
Venues deployed, across Australia
UWB / BLE
Selectable radio, chosen per venue
POS
Integrated — orders tied to table flags
10,000+
Flags in service across the estate
The situation

Bistro-style service has one structural flaw: the customer orders at the counter, then disappears. Across a large venue — especially one with outdoor seating — the server leaves the kitchen with two plates going cold and no idea where table 32 actually is. Fluidity engineered the device and the software that close that gap — for BlueCats, the Australian location-technology company, who took it to more than one hundred venues.

Two plates, going cold, no table number in sight

Venues running counter service want it both ways, reasonably: fewer staff taking orders, but food and drinks still delivered to the table. That works only if the delivery is fast — and finding the customer is the slowest, most error-prone step in the whole chain.

In a small café the server scans the room. In a large venue, across multiple rooms and an outdoor terrace, scanning the room is a walking tour — performed with full hands, in front of the customer whose food is cooling.

Why this technology

The device is a table flag — a numbered stand the customer takes to their seat, sitting about 30 cm above the table. Inside is a selectable positioning radio: UWB or BLE, chosen to fit the venue rather than fixed by the product.

  • UWB where the venue needs to-the-table, even to-the-person precision — dense seating, large identical rooms, service standards measured in seconds.
  • BLE where zonal accuracy of a metre or so is enough — because at one metre, the flag itself does the rest. The server can see a numbered stand from a metre away.

The product behaves identically either way — same flag, same software, same workflow. The only thing a venue chooses is accuracy. And that is the design insight: the flag is part of the accuracy budget. The radio only has to get the server within sight of a visible marker — the last thirty centimetres are solved by eyesight, which is free. Whole-venue economics change when you stop paying for precision that a human can supply.

What we built

A device, a retrofit, and the software behind both

  • A custom-designed, manufactured housing around off-the-shelf UWB and BLE positioning PCBs — engineering spent where nothing off the shelf existed, standard electronics where it did.
  • Three years on a battery from the supermarket. Each flag runs about three years on a standard CR2032 coin cell — user-replaceable, off the shelf. At ten thousand devices there is no charging fleet, no proprietary battery, no recall: a dead flag is fixed by whoever is standing near the till.
  • A retrofit path. The same PCBs could be fitted into some venues' existing table-number stands — keeping the furniture the venue already owned and the look it had chosen.
  • Off-the-shelf locators and a third-party location engine. No reinvented positioning stack; the differentiation lives in the device and the workflow, not in redoing solved problems.
  • POS integration, built by Fluidity. The order is assigned a table number at the counter, and from that moment the order and the flag are the same thing. Connection is by a structured API that can present itself as an order printer on the network — so most POS systems integrate without bespoke work.
  • A geofence on the front door. If a flag leaves the venue, the site manager gets an SMS. Ten thousand devices stay ten thousand devices.
  • A search-first UI. The server types "32" and the floor plan shows where flag 32 is standing — indoors, on the terrace, wherever the customer wandered.

Straight answer: not ours

The system was engineered for BlueCats, the Australian location-technology company. The product and its IP are theirs — they took it to market, and it is their success as much as ours.

What is ours is the capability that built it — the industrial design, the firmware, the POS integration and the workflow thinking. Nothing stops us engineering an equivalent for an operation that needs its own. That is what System Development means: when nothing off the shelf fits, we build it — for you, and it is yours.

Ten steaks are not two coffees

The software logs the wait on every order and surfaces the ones taking too long, graphically — a live picture of service health rather than a complaint arriving after the fact.

And because the POS integration knows what is in each order, the expected delivery time is honest. A table that ordered ten steaks is not flagged late on the timeline of a table that ordered two coffees — the kitchen's reality is built into the clock. Late means genuinely late, so when the board says a table needs attention, staff believe it.

The hard part

The radio was never the hard part — the product behaved identically on UWB or BLE, and the only thing a venue chose was accuracy. The hard part of a hundred-venue product is the hundred venues.

  • Aesthetics. This device sits on the customer's table, in the customer's hand, inside a room someone paid a designer to get right — and every venue's look is different. The answer was one housing, colour-printed plastics: each venue's own branding and font preferences on a single mass-produced design. An individually branded estate without a hundred tooling runs.
  • POS diversity. A hundred venues run many different POS systems, and a bespoke integration per system would have killed the economics. The answer was a structured API behind a disguise: the system appears on the network as an order printer — the one device every POS already knows how to talk to. Most systems connect without a line of custom work, because as far as they are concerned, they are printing a docket.

Both answers share a shape: do not fight variability venue by venue — build the one thing that absorbs it.

What transfers
  • Spend the last metre on eyesight, not RF. A visible marker plus a one-metre fix beats centimetre precision at a fraction of the infrastructure — if the workflow is designed around it.
  • Choose the radio per venue, not per product. One design, two technologies, and the decision made where it belongs: against each site's layout and service standard.
  • Retrofit beats replace. Fitting electronics into the table numbers a venue already owns removes cost, waste and the argument about aesthetics in one move.
  • Design the battery for the person who will change it. A three-year life on a coin cell anyone can buy means the maintenance plan is a kitchen drawer, not a service contract.
  • Integrate the POS or you have built a toy. The location of a flag means nothing until it is the location of an order. And the way in is to look like a printer — the one device every POS already trusts.

Planning something like this?

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