ZOLA Electric

Architecture, design and development of an Elixir-based communication gateway for off-grid, sustainable energy systems -- from the CAN bus up to the cloud protocols.
Completed Elixir Nerves Embedded Buildroot CAN bus Protobuf CoAP 6LoWPAN SNMP Mnesia Architecture IoT

Context

ZOLA Electric builds off-grid solar energy systems for markets where the grid is unreliable or absent. Their devices – panels, batteries, inverters – have to be monitored and controlled remotely, over intermittent and expensive links, on hardware with a tight power and memory budget.

What I did

Lead developer and architect of the PV monitoring and control gateway:

  • Architecture and design of an Elixir/Nerves communication gateway running on the embedded platform.
  • Device-side integration over CAN bus and 6LoWPAN, telemetry encoding with Protobuf, transport over CoAP and SNMP.
  • Local persistence and replication with Mnesia, so the gateway keeps working through connectivity outages.
  • Embedded Linux build and integration with Buildroot.

Outcome

A single gateway codebase covering the whole path from field devices to the cloud back end, deployed on off-grid systems in production.