Industrial IoT
Industrial IoT Development
Raonebytes builds industrial IoT hardware for factories, plants, utilities and field operations: rugged sensor nodes, wireless gateways, embedded firmware, cloud dashboards and manufacturing-ready prototypes. We take on the parts most software teams underestimate, which is everything between the sensor and a clean data stream.
The short answer
Industrial IoT development covers the sensor hardware, gateway firmware, industrial protocols and cloud layer needed to get plant-floor data into a system people can act on. An industrial IoT prototype typically costs $8,000 to $20,000 and takes 8 to 14 weeks, with most of the engineering going into ruggedisation, protocol integration and power design rather than the cloud dashboard.
Common builds
Condition monitoring
Predictive maintenance
Remote telemetry
Asset tracking
Energy monitoring
What Raonebytes delivers
Sensor hardware
Custom PCB design for analog, digital, power and wireless sensor systems, including the isolation and protection an industrial input needs.
Gateway firmware
BLE, Wi-Fi, LoRa, LTE-M, NB-IoT, MQTT and Modbus support, with secure over-the-air update built in from the start rather than added later.
Cloud dashboards
Provisioning, telemetry ingestion, alerting, APIs and operator dashboards, scoped so the device and the backend are validated against each other.
Field readiness
Enclosures, power budgeting, EMC-aware layout and DFM handoff so the design has a realistic path from bench to deployment.
What makes this hard
The constraints that decide whether a design survives contact with the real world.
Electrical noise on the plant floor
Variable-frequency drives, contactors and large motors inject noise that swamps a naive analog front end. Industrial designs need galvanic isolation, careful grounding and filtering on every signal entering the enclosure, decisions that are far cheaper to make during schematic design than after a failed site trial.
Brownfield equipment that predates IoT
Most machines worth monitoring have no data interface, or expose a proprietary one. The practical options are non-invasive sensing (current clamps, vibration, temperature) or reading an existing fieldbus, and choosing wrongly early forces a redesign later.
Power and connectivity that cannot be assumed
Field assets often have no mains power and patchy coverage. That drives a battery or energy-harvesting budget measured in years, which in turn constrains sampling rate, radio choice and duty cycle far more tightly than a mains-powered product.
Deployments that must survive without a technician
A node in a substation or a pump house cannot be rebooted by hand. Watchdogs, store-and-forward buffering across outages, and a rollback-safe OTA path are baseline requirements, not enhancements.
Standards and protocols that shape the design
Identifying these early is what keeps them from forcing a redesign later.
- Modbus RTU / TCP
- The de facto register-based protocol across industrial equipment, over RS-485 serial or Ethernet. Usually the fastest route to reading an existing PLC, drive or meter without touching the machine control logic.
- OPC UA
- A vendor-neutral interoperability standard that adds an information model, authentication and encryption on top of transport. Increasingly what plant IT expects when data crosses from the OT network into enterprise systems.
- MQTT and Sparkplug B
- MQTT is the common publish/subscribe transport for telemetry. Sparkplug B layers a defined topic namespace, payload format and birth/death state handling on top, which is what makes MQTT dependable for industrial state rather than just messaging.
- IEC 61000-6-2 / 61000-6-4
- The EMC immunity and emissions standards for industrial environments. They set the surge, ESD and fast-transient levels a device must tolerate, and they influence PCB layout, connector choice and enclosure design.
- IEC 60529 ingress protection and ATEX / IECEx
- IP65 and IP67 ratings define dust and water ingress performance for field enclosures. Sites with explosive atmospheres add ATEX or IECEx requirements, which constrain enclosure design and energy limits and must be identified before layout begins.
Typical technology stack
Sensing
Current transformers and Rogowski coils for non-invasive load measurement, MEMS accelerometers for vibration, RTDs and thermocouples for temperature, and 4-20 mA loops where long cable runs demand noise immunity.
Compute
STM32 and ESP32 class microcontrollers for nodes, moving to i.MX or Raspberry Pi CM-class modules for gateways that terminate protocols or run local analytics.
Connectivity
LoRaWAN and NB-IoT for wide-area low-power links, LTE-M where bandwidth matters, and Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet inside facilities that already have infrastructure.
Power
24 V DC industrial rails, wide-input DC-DC conversion, and lithium primary or rechargeable packs sized against a measured duty cycle rather than a datasheet figure.
Edge processing
Feature extraction close to the sensor (RMS, FFT bands, thresholds) so the link carries findings rather than raw waveforms, which is usually the difference between a viable and an unaffordable data plan.
Backend
MQTT brokers, time-series storage, alerting rules and operator dashboards, with device provisioning and certificate handling treated as part of the product rather than an afterthought.
Why this matters
Industrial IoT fails more often at the physical layer than in software. A dashboard is straightforward once clean, trustworthy data arrives, and getting there means surviving electrical noise, sealing an enclosure properly, budgeting power honestly and integrating with equipment that was never designed to be read. Raonebytes designs the electronics, firmware, enclosure and backend as one system, which is why the awkward interactions between them surface during the prototype rather than after installation. Our robotics and ROV work in particular involved exactly this combination of sensing, embedded control and field-durable mechanical design.
Frequently asked questions
What does an industrial IoT prototype cost?
A mid-complexity industrial IoT device typically runs $8,000 to $20,000 for a working prototype, covering custom PCB design, firmware, enclosure and a basic cloud link. Simpler single-sensor nodes can start near $5,000. Cost is driven mainly by how many signal types the device handles and how rugged the deployment environment is.
How long does an industrial IoT build take?
Most industrial IoT prototypes take 8 to 14 weeks from kickoff to a tested unit. Schematic and layout usually take 3 to 4 weeks, fabrication and assembly 2 to 3 weeks, and firmware plus integration the remainder, with protocol integration against real equipment the most common source of extra time.
Can you monitor machines that have no data interface?
Yes, and this is the common case. Non-invasive sensing such as current clamps, vibration sensors and surface temperature probes lets you characterise a machine without modifying it or touching its control system, which also avoids the approvals that changing a PLC program usually triggers.
Which industrial connectivity options do you support?
We work with BLE, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, LTE-M, NB-IoT and wired Ethernet on the transport side, and Modbus RTU and TCP, MQTT and Sparkplug B, and OPC UA on the protocol side. The right choice depends on coverage, power budget and what the site IT team will allow onto their network.
Can you design for hazardous or outdoor environments?
We design to IP65 and IP67 ingress targets and industrial EMC levels as a matter of course. Sites with explosive atmospheres requiring ATEX or IECEx certification need those constraints identified before layout begins, because they restrict enclosure design and stored energy in ways that are impractical to retrofit.
Do you deliver the cloud side as well as the hardware?
Yes. We can deliver device hardware, embedded firmware, gateway logic, cloud ingestion, dashboards and manufacturing handoff as one integrated prototype, which avoids the common failure where hardware and backend are specified by different teams and only meet at integration.
Related capabilities
Build with Raonebytes
Send your requirements and get a fixed quote, typically within 24 hours. NDA on every project.