Hello everyone,
new joiner here, and starting with, probably, a very controversial request. (I guess this should be crossposted in the Open source hardware category, but here feels more appropriate).
I want to build open source hardware and software for the residential energy management (inverter, mppt, bms, ev chargers),
and eventually build a company on top of it.
Disclaimers:
- I have a very rudimental understanding of EE
- My day job is in software. I work on machine learning problems in one of those big tech companies, and have roughly 20 years experience in the field.
- I have a good understanding of the cost ($$) of what I'm proposing here
- I have never design, implemented, certified and sold hardware. I did, although, got trough certification of some real time software in the automotive industry. The bureaucracy aspect is understood.
- I'm here to learn, but please be open minded and nice
. When a newbie comes to me with software questions, I always start with the assumption that maybe they know something that I don't know, despite my experience in the field.
Some beliefs / intuitions.
- The user experience when it comes to electrification of homes, energy management, and setup of energy positive homes is suboptimal (it's complicated, confusing, and suboptimal from a performance standpoint)
- I'm seriously worried we are going through a brand siloing. Talking about the European market, you start seeing more and more companies offering 'full solutions' that are not inter-operable with other hardware (Inverter / mptt, bms, energy meter and optimizer with proprietary protocols, etc).
- The digitalisation of the hardware is still years behind. I worked with few protocols (CanOpen, Modbus, some proprietary ones). They are rudimental, hard to use, and prevent a lot of further optimisation (ie.: they operate best effort with no real-time guarantee, they are often buggy because the underneath firmware is not fully implemented, updates are hard to execute, etc).
- A lot of the products out there, requires a full commitment to a use case from the get go. I really hope this is not going to trigger people, but I feel there is no much of a pathway to modularity. (ie.: if I double my system kWh capacity, I need to replace completely half of my components, rather than just add additional).
- There is a business model : When it comes to this segment of Hardware / Software, being open source allows experts to implement / use it for free (license alike of AGPL), and help iterating and improve it, while normal consumer would still purchase the hardware / service.
- I can talk for hours on the value of having advance control software in a residential system, from local performance to grid optimisation.
If you read up to this point, thank you. You are either think I'm crazy and full of BS, or you think I might have some point, and you want to know what's next.
I'm looking for a partner(s), that is interesting in exploring this one layer deeper.
I know I want to eventually cover the grid tie, and island use cases, battery and ev (v2h), but there needs to be proper sequencing and decide where it makes sense to start.
Ideally we would first brainstorm the entire product line, go extremely wide with the thinking, and then decide where to start first.
I don't have a geo preference, but ideally UK or Europe for a timezone perspective (or at least someone familiar with the grid systems / legislation in 1 of the european + uk countries)
I'm happy to pay for consultancy, but what I'm really after is a partner to work on this together. I don't believe paying my way through this is the way to go. I need someone that is willing to challenge me, while believing in the end goal. If I just throw money at my intuitions, I will get something most likely not useful as an end product.
So, anyone interested ? (open also to general commentary, but please be nice, I'm conscious I'm a bit crazy)