[ENERGY] Energy & Smart Grid

Battery, solar and grid-edge monitoring — built for hardware nobody's standing next to.

Monitoring a distributed energy installation reliably means designing for remote, intermittently-connected hardware from the start, not adapting a connectivity assumption that only holds in the lab. Rivix builds the sensing, firmware and telemetry pipeline as one system.

What this covers

The full stack, scoped for distributed energy hardware.

Technical considerations

What actually shapes the architecture in this space.

Physical security for hardware in the open

The design assumption is that an attacker can get physical access to the device: JTAG/SWD debug ports disabled or locked down in production builds, key material stored in hardware-backed secure elements rather than plain flash, and tamper-evident or tamper-responsive enclosures. Firmware runs signed and verified at every boot, extended to signed, authenticated OTA updates with anti-rollback protection.

Network segmentation as a baseline

A grid-edge device's telemetry, config, and OTA path is kept as a separate trust boundary from utility control systems — defense-in-depth rather than a single perimeter.

Smart meter connectivity options

RF mesh (hop-to-hop to a collector) suits dense residential/urban deployments. Cellular — LTE-M, NB-IoT, or standard LTE — works per-device with no collector infrastructure but carries a recurring data-plan cost, better suited to sparse or rural areas. Power line communication rides the existing distribution wiring, with signal quality sensitive to the grid segment. Utility rollouts often combine mesh or PLC in dense areas with a cellular tail for remote ones. Reporting at 15- or 5-minute granularity instead of monthly/daily totals enables demand response and outage detection, at the cost of data volume at fleet scale.

Where protection logic has to live

The battery management system is treated as the authoritative source for cell-level health and safety; site monitoring aggregates BMS, inverter and production data rather than duplicating BMS function. Time-sensitive protective actions — over-voltage charge cutoff, fault alarms — run locally at the edge, independent of connectivity. Our EV thermal-monitoring module runs cell-level sensing into an automotive-grade MCU, with diagnostics evaluated locally and reported over the in-vehicle bus rather than depending on an external network.

Proven in the field

Real builds in EV and energy systems.

Pulled from our case-study library — same AI/human split shown in full, industry context included.

EV Battery-Pack Thermal Monitoring Module

US-based EV / battery technology company

A distributed monitoring module captures thermal conditions across an EV battery pack and identifies abnormal temperature behavior for battery-management and diagnostic systems.

~28%Estimated AI-first engineering effort reduction
Read full case study →

Solar Micro-Inverter Fleet Monitoring Platform

US-based renewable-energy / solar technology company

A connected platform collects operational telemetry from distributed solar micro-inverters and provides fleet-wide visibility into performance, device health and faults.

~33%Estimated AI-first engineering effort reduction
Read full case study →
Field Notes

What we've written about building in this space.

[ENERGY]

Solar/Battery Monitoring for Distributed Energy

Designing for remote, intermittently-connected hardware from the start, not adapting a lab-only assumption.

Read the article →
[ENERGY]

Grid-Edge Device Security for Energy Infrastructure

Physically exposed grid-edge hardware needs secure boot, signed updates, and segmentation as a baseline.

Read the article →
[ENERGY]

Smart Meter System Design: Protocols & Data

How often a meter reports, and over what network, sets the ceiling on cost, battery life, and utility value.

Read the article →
Common questions

What people ask before scoping an energy or grid-edge deployment.

How do you secure grid-edge hardware sitting in public or semi-public locations?

Grid-edge security is a genuinely different problem from a consumer gadget — it's designed as a baseline, not an add-on, from the first schematic.

Which RTOS / wireless stacks do you work with?

FreeRTOS, Zephyr and bare-metal on the RTOS side; BLE, Wi-Fi, LoRa, Zigbee and cellular on connectivity, chosen based on your power and range constraints, not by default.

Is this on-device or cloud AI?

Both, chosen by the constraint — real-time and privacy-sensitive workloads run on-device; fleet-wide pattern detection runs in the cloud.

Do you source components too?

Yes — BOM optimization and sourcing (including lifecycle/obsolescence risk) is part of the hardware engagement, not a separate line item.

Building an EV, solar or grid-edge monitoring system?