Field
Services Electronics
Engineering
Rugged connected electronics built for unattended outdoor deployment — remote monitoring RTUs, field handheld devices, lone worker safety hardware, and SCADA-integrated sensor networks designed to survive years in the field without servicing.
The Challenge
Field Deployments Demand Hardware Built for the Field
Utility operations and field service organizations are under pressure to modernize — AMI rollouts, pipeline integrity monitoring, grid digitization, distributed energy resource integration. The data requirements have grown dramatically. But the physical infrastructure is spread across hundreds of miles of terrain, connectivity is unreliable or absent, power is scarce, and equipment sits unattended in weather extremes for months between maintenance visits.
Off-the-shelf IoT hardware was designed for warehouse environments and connected offices. It lacks the enclosure ratings, power budgets, industrial protocol stacks, and field-survivability characteristics that utility and field service applications demand. Hardware that passes bench testing and fails in the first winter is not a prototype problem — it's a fundamental mismatch between commercial hardware design assumptions and field deployment reality.
Ankh builds custom field electronics with every design decision anchored to deployment constraints: temperature range, ingress protection class, power budget per transmission cycle, connectivity window duration, and mean time between service visits. We design to the constraint, not around it.
Field Services Hardware We Engineer
Custom electronics designed for deployment in substations, pipeline corridors, utility poles, and the hands of field technicians working in conditions that destroy consumer hardware.
Every field electronics project starts with the enclosure and the environment. We design PCBs with conformal coating for moisture resistance, select components with industrial temperature ratings, and engineer enclosures to IP67 or IP68 specifications. Connector selection, vibration analysis, UV material choice, and thermal management are embedded in the design process from day one — not added at DVT when changing them would require a respin.
Remote sensor platforms on battery or solar power demand firmware that treats current draw as a first-class design constraint. We model power budgets at the component level — MCU sleep states, radio duty cycles, sample intervals — and validate against real solar insolation curves and primary battery discharge profiles. LTE-M and NB-IoT connectivity with store-and-forward buffering for intermittent coverage, and OTA update pipelines that eliminate truck rolls for the life of the deployed fleet.
Offline-first iOS and Android applications for field technicians operating in connectivity dead zones — job dispatch, inspection checklists, work order management, and asset documentation that syncs when coverage returns. On the operations side: real-time dispatch dashboards, predictive maintenance AI for pump and transformer fault prediction, and edge anomaly detection firmware that identifies failure signatures at the sensor before they become outages.
Utility infrastructure runs Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP, DNP3, and IEC 61850. New field hardware must speak these protocols natively to integrate with existing SCADA platforms — OSIsoft PI, Ignition, GE iFIX, Wonderware — without a translation layer. We implement these protocol stacks at the firmware level, not through third-party middleware, so latency and reliability meet SCADA requirements from a device that also runs on a solar panel in a remote corridor.
Platforms
Platforms We Build Field Electronics On
Proven silicon and software stacks selected for each application — optimized for power budget, connectivity range, protocol requirements, and the physical demands of outdoor field deployment.
Why Field Services Teams Choose Ankh
Designed for the Field, Not the Lab
Every hardware decision is made with deployment environment in mind. Temperature range, ingress protection class, vibration profile, UV exposure, and connector mate cycles are design inputs — not afterthoughts. Hardware that passes bench testing and fails at a remote pump station in February is a fundamental design failure, not a manufacturing defect.
Low-Power Expertise
Firmware and hardware co-designed for multi-year battery or solar field life. We model power budgets at the component level — MCU sleep states, radio duty cycles, sensor sample intervals — and validate against real solar insolation and primary battery discharge profiles before first silicon. OTA update pipelines eliminate truck rolls for the deployment lifetime.
Protocol Fluent
Modbus RTU, DNP3, IEC 61850, MQTT, and custom serial protocols implemented at the firmware level, not through middleware appliances. Field hardware that speaks your existing SCADA's language from power-on, integrating with OSIsoft PI, Ignition, GE iFIX, and Wonderware without a translation layer between the device and the control system.
Full-Stack Field-to-Cloud
Sensor hardware, embedded firmware, cellular connectivity, cloud telemetry ingestion, SCADA integration, and field operator mobile app — all under one roof. No coordination tax between hardware vendors, firmware contractors, and software teams. One team owns the full signal chain from sensor to dashboard to dispatch center.
Remote Pump Station Monitoring Network
A regional water utility was operating 340 pump stations across 2,200 square miles on quarterly manual inspection schedules. Seven unplanned pump failures in a single quarter, each requiring emergency dispatch averaging 14 hours to restore service, created pressure to modernize. We designed a solar-powered RTU with LTE-M modem, integrated Modbus RTU I/O for existing pressure and flow instrumentation, and a predictive maintenance model trained on motor current signatures. Eighteen months post-deployment: zero scheduled maintenance visits required, four pending pump failures identified and addressed during planned maintenance windows.
Read the Case StudyBuilding hardware for the field? Let's engineer it right.
Whether you're a utility modernizing remote infrastructure, a field service organization replacing consumer hardware with purpose-built devices, or an FSM software vendor building the hardware layer your platform runs on — we engage at the engineering level from day one.
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