IoT Systems That Don't Die in the Field
We build connected products end-to-end: firmware that survives a brownout, a fleet backend that scales past the first 10,000 devices, OTA updates that don't brick the install base, and dashboards your operations team will actually use. Designed by engineers who've debugged a sensor on a rooftop in the rain — not just drawn the architecture on a slide.
You don't need a clever demo.
You need 10,000 devices that stay online.
IoT projects look easy on a workbench and impossible at scale. Most die between the prototype and the 500th install — when batteries drain twice as fast as the spec sheet, the cellular plan doubles overnight, the OTA rollout bricks 4% of the fleet, and there's no way to roll back. We build for the field: flaky networks, hostile environments, technicians who only get one truck roll, and a CFO who wants to know unit economics.
Battery life half what the spec promised
Datasheet said 5 years. Reality is 14 months because the firmware wakes the radio every minute "just in case". Now you're replacing 8,000 devices and eating the cost.
A connectivity bill that ate the margin
Nobody modeled the cellular cost per device per year. The MVNO contract has overage clauses. The protocol is chatty. Per-unit gross margin just turned negative.
An OTA rollout that bricked the fleet
No A/B partition. No staged rollout. No rollback path. One bad image and 4% of devices are paperweights, and the only fix is a truck roll to every site.
What You Actually Get
No vague deliverables. Here's exactly what lands in your hands.
Production firmware
C / C++ / Rust on bare-metal, Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or embedded Linux. Power-profiled, watchdog-protected, signed, and built from a reproducible CI pipeline.
A fleet backend that scales
MQTT, LwM2M, or HTTP ingest, time-series storage, device shadow, command/control, and a provisioning flow. Tested at the device count you're actually planning for.
OTA that won't brick the fleet
A/B partition, signed images, staged rollout, automatic rollback on failure, and a kill switch. Tested on real devices in real conditions before a single field install.
A fleet ops dashboard
Live device health, battery, RSSI, firmware version, last-seen, geographic distribution. Alerts that page the right team. Built for the technician, not the data scientist.
A Real IoT Engineering Team
Shipping a connected product takes more than one firmware engineer and a cloud account. Six roles you get on every Pillai Infotech IoT build.
Senior Embedded Engineer
C, C++, Rust on Cortex-M, ESP32, NXP, STM32, Nordic. RTOS internals, DMA, low-power modes, peripheral drivers. The person who reads a datasheet for fun.
RF & Connectivity Engineer
BLE, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Thread, Matter. Knows what kills range, what kills battery, and how to negotiate with carriers.
Cloud & Fleet Backend Engineer
AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, EMQX, HiveMQ, Greengrass, edge gateways. Designs for the day you have 10x the devices and 100x the messages.
Power & Reliability Engineer
Sets the power budget on day one and enforces it. Profiles wake cycles, radio duty, sleep currents. Gets battery life from the spec sheet to the field.
Device Security Lead
Secure boot, signed firmware, hardware root of trust, device identity, certificate provisioning, mutual TLS. Designs for the day a device gets reverse-engineered.
Manufacturing & Field Ops Lead
Provisioning at the factory, bring-up tests, RMA process, field tech tooling. The bridge between the firmware repo and the actual loading dock.
You See Everything. In Real Time.
Every Pillai Infotech project comes with a dedicated client dashboard. Kanban boards, live logs, test results, meeting notes — it's all visible the moment it happens. No status-report theatre, no "we'll get back to you", no surprises at the demo. You work with us like you work with your own team.
Kanban Board, Live
Every epic, every story, every task — visible on your dashboard. Drag, comment, reprioritize. It's the same board our team works from.
Documented Everything
Every decision, spec, API contract, and architecture diagram lives in the dashboard. Searchable, versioned, linked to the tasks they shaped.
Live Logs & Test Results
Build logs, deployment logs, test suite results — streamed to your dashboard the moment they run. You never have to ask "did the build pass?"
Meetings → Tasks, Automatically
Every meeting is recorded, transcribed, and every action point is auto-converted into a tracked task assigned to the right person. Nothing gets lost between calls.
Sprint Burndown & Velocity
See exactly how much work is done, how much remains, and our velocity over time. If a sprint is slipping, you see it the same moment we do.
Comment, Approve, Decide — In-Place
Comment on any task, approve designs, sign off on specs, and raise blockers directly in the dashboard. Everything tied to the work, not buried in email threads.
IoT Systems We Know How to Ship
We pick the radio, the MCU, and the cloud to match the deployment, not a parts catalog.
🏭 Industrial monitoring & predictive maintenance
Vibration, temperature, current, pressure sensors on rotating equipment. Edge inference where it pays off, cloud aggregation where it doesn't. Modbus, OPC-UA, MQTT.
🌾 Agriculture & remote sensing
LoRaWAN and NB-IoT sensors in fields, greenhouses, livestock. Solar-harvesting, multi-year battery life, gateways that survive a winter.
🏠 Smart home & consumer IoT
Matter, Thread, BLE products that pair in under 30 seconds, work offline, and don't need a cloud round-trip to turn on a light.
🚛 Fleet & asset tracking
GNSS + cellular trackers, geofencing, trip detection, driver behavior, cold-chain monitoring. Built for the truck, the shipping container, and the high-value pallet.
⚡ Energy & grid edge
Smart meters, solar inverter telemetry, EV charger backends, demand response. Time-series at scale, grid-code compliance, utility integration.
🏥 Connected medical devices
BLE wearables, home monitoring, telemetry to clinical platforms. IEC 62304, HIPAA, MDR-aware design with the regulatory paper trail to match.
The IoT Stack We Use
Bare-metal where it wins, Linux where it wins. We pick the boring tool when it's the right one.
Firmware & MCU
Connectivity
Cloud & Edge
Data & Ops
A Six-Stage IoT Delivery Process
Built around the reality that hardware ships once, and firmware lives in the field for a decade.
Field Reality & BOM Call
Where do the devices live, what powers them, what connects them, what does each one need to cost. We get this decided in week one, with a real BOM and a unit economics model.
Architecture & Power Budget
MCU, radio, sensors, sleep modes, wake schedule, expected battery life — all written down with numbers, not adjectives. Reviewed against the field constraints before the first PCB.
Firmware + Cloud in Lockstep
Firmware and backend developed together, integrated weekly on real hardware. No "it worked in the simulator" surprises at integration time.
Pilot in the Field
50–200 devices in the real environment for 30+ days. Power, connectivity, OTA, failure modes — all measured against the spec, not the lab bench.
Manufacturing & Provisioning
Factory test fixtures, secure key injection, certificate provisioning, serial numbers, packaging. Built so the contract manufacturer doesn't need to call us every week.
Fleet Ops & OTA Cadence
Staged OTA, automatic rollback, fleet health dashboards, on-call rotation. Hotfix path proven on day one — not invented during the first field outage.
Three Ways to Engage
IoT projects don't fit one shape. Pick the one that matches your stage.
IoT Scoping Sprint
Two-week engagement to nail the BOM, radio choice, power budget, and unit economics. You leave with a real cost model and a build plan.
- BOM + radio + MCU decision
- Power budget + battery model
- Unit economics in writing
Fixed-Scope IoT Build
End-to-end delivery: firmware, cloud, dashboards, OTA, manufacturing handover, and a 60-day field warranty.
- Fixed scope, fixed price
- Includes pilot deployment
- 60-day post-launch warranty
Embedded IoT Squad
A dedicated firmware + cloud + ops squad working alongside your team on a continuous fleet roadmap.
- FW + cloud + ops + PM
- Monthly retainer, scale up/down
- Best for: live fleets
Honest Answers to IoT Reality Questions
The questions every smart buyer asks before signing. Here's what we tell them.
Cellular, LoRa, BLE, or Wi-Fi?
Depends on power budget, range, data volume, and where the device lives. Cellular (NB-IoT / LTE-M) when you need anywhere coverage and can tolerate the data cost. LoRaWAN when you need multi-year battery and tiny payloads. BLE when there's a phone or gateway nearby. Wi-Fi only when there's mains power and a router. We model all four against your use case before recommending.
How long will the battery actually last?
Whatever the firmware lets it. Datasheets are best-case. We build a power model in week two — sleep current, wake duration, radio TX/RX, sensor reads — and validate it on a power profiler against real hardware. If the spec says 5 years, we don't ship until the bench test agrees.
How do you do OTA without bricking devices?
A/B partition, signed images, version pinning, staged rollout (1% → 10% → 50% → 100%), automatic rollback on boot-loop, and a kill switch from the cloud. Tested on real devices in adverse conditions (power loss mid-flash, partial download, bad signature) before the first production rollout.
Who manufactures the hardware?
You do, with a contract manufacturer of your choice. We design the PCB, the BOM, the test fixtures, and the provisioning flow. We've worked with CMs in India, Vietnam, China, and the US, and we'll sit on the bring-up calls until first article is signed off.
What about device security?
Secure boot, signed firmware, hardware root of trust where the MCU supports it, unique per-device certificates injected at the factory, mutual TLS to the cloud, and a rotation plan. We assume devices will be physically captured and reverse-engineered — and design so a single compromised device doesn't compromise the fleet.
AWS IoT, Azure, or self-hosted?
AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub when you want managed scale and your team is already there. Self-hosted EMQX or HiveMQ when data sovereignty matters, when the AWS bill at your fleet size is brutal, or when you need on-prem. We'll model the 3-year cost both ways.
How do you handle the connectivity bill?
We model it per device per year in week one, before any code. Protocol choice, payload size, message frequency, and carrier plan are all decided against that budget. We negotiate with MVNOs (Soracom, 1NCE, Twilio Super SIM) on your behalf and we'll tell you if the unit economics don't work — early enough to change the design.
Can you handle medical or industrial certification?
Yes. IEC 62304 for medical, IEC 61508 for functional safety, FCC / CE / IC for radio. We design the development process, documentation, and traceability to match — from day one, not as a retrofit at the end.
What happens when a device fails in the field?
Fleet dashboard flags it, ops gets paged, and we triage from telemetry before anyone touches a truck. RMA flow built in. Most issues we've seen in the last 2 years were fixed by an OTA, not a swap.
Can you sign an NDA before we share details?
Always. NDA before the first call. Schematics, firmware, and field data stay under your control. We're happy to work inside your tooling if compliance requires it.