[IIOT] Industrial IoT & Sensors

Predictive maintenance and industrial IoT, built for the plant floor.

Most industrial IoT projects aren't greenfield builds — they're adding sensing to equipment that's been running for years and was never designed to be instrumented. Rivix scopes hardware, firmware and the cloud pipeline together, so the model isn't the bottleneck — data quality and sensor coverage are handled first.

What this covers

The full stack, scoped for a plant-floor deployment.

Technical considerations

What actually shapes the architecture in this space.

Matching sensors to failure modes

Bearing wear shows up in vibration and acoustic signatures; motor winding degradation shows up in current draw and thermal signatures; a pump cavitating shows up in pressure and flow anomalies. Sampling rate follows the physics — a high-frequency vibration signature needs fast sampling to resolve, while slow thermal degradation tolerates infrequent sampling.

Modeling that starts before labeled failures exist

Programs typically start with anomaly detection against a healthy baseline, since no failure labels are needed yet, then move to a supervised failure-prediction classifier once real labeled failure data accumulates from the field.

Retrofitting equipment that was never built to be instrumented

Equipment with a PLC controller often exposes operational data over Modbus, and newer or upgraded installations may support OPC-UA. Where that's not available, non-invasive sensors — current clamps for motor load, external vibration/acoustic sensors, surface-mount temperature sensors — add sensing without an electrical connection into the equipment.

Ruggedization decisions that shape the schematic

Target IP/NEMA rating gets decided early, since it drives thermal derating, sealed/gasketed connector selection and capacitive-touch-vs-exposed-button tradeoffs. Conformal coating protects solder joints; BGA and fine-pitch components need underfill or mechanical support in high-vibration designs; EMI shielding and filtering matter near motor drives and VFDs.

Proven in the field

Real builds in industrial and building IoT.

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

Building-Wide Occupancy & HVAC Optimization Platform

US-based building-management / energy-efficiency technology company

The platform combines occupancy and environmental sensing across a building to understand space utilization and provide intelligence for more efficient HVAC operation.

~37%Estimated AI-first engineering effort reduction
Read full case study →

Battery-Free Ambient Room & Occupancy Sensor

US-based smart-building / IoT startup

A battery-free environmental sensor detects room conditions and occupancy while minimizing energy consumption and maintenance requirements.

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

What we've written about building in this space.

[IIOT]

Predictive Maintenance 101: What Data You Actually Need

Predictive maintenance fails more often from insufficient or low-quality data than from model choice.

Read the article →
[IIOT]

Predictive Maintenance for Industrial Equipment

The model is the easy part — sensor coverage, data quality, and organizational trust decide whether the program survives past the pilot.

Read the article →
[IIOT]

Designing Ruggedized IoT Hardware for Harsh Industrial Environments

The requirements that make a device survive a plant floor need to shape component selection from the first schematic.

Read the article →
[IIOT]

Retrofitting Legacy Industrial Equipment with IoT Sensors

The first decision is whether to add sensors at all, or just read the data the equipment already has.

Read the article →
Common questions

What people ask before scoping an industrial IoT deployment.

Can you add AI to equipment or products we've already built?

Yes — this is one of our most common standalone engagements: adding predictive maintenance or on-device inference to hardware and firmware that already ships.

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 retrofit sensors onto equipment that was never built to be instrumented?

Yes — the first decision is always whether to add sensors at all, or just read the data the equipment already has.

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.

Scoping an industrial IoT or predictive-maintenance deployment?