Our highly skilled team have developed a monitoring and control platform for the remote management of C&I sector energy systems in Southern Africa.

Helping customers design, deploy, control and maintain their fleets of off-grid systems.

Odyssey Energy Solutions acquired Ferntech and I'm continuing as tech lead. The emphasis of my work is to merge the former Ferntech and Odyssey tech stacks into a suite of scaleable SaaS products and to extend the functionality of the combined product.

I was the idea originator and one of four company founders. Using IoT technologies, our aim was to create a scaleable hardware/software SaaS product which assists small to medium businesses manage their fleets of renewable energy powered, off-grid systems.Being the technical lead, I personally spearheaded all proof of concept developments, technology selection and wrote a lot of the software until we could grow our team. Leadership became more important so I fulfilled a number of roles such as team mentor, product owner, scrum master, part-time UI designer, DevOps engineer, Linux system administrator, web developer and did pretty much anything technical to keep the company going.Our tech stack has YOCTO Linux as the embedded hardware foundation, python wherever possible, MQTT for data transmission, InfluxDB for timeseries data storage, PostgreSQL for relational data, Angular for the web UI, Django REST Framework for the APIs, which relies heavily on JSON and AWS for cloud services.The main function of our embedded software is to monitor and control a wide variety of devices such as inverters, solar charge controllers, lithium battery management systems, energy meters and many others. We mainly used physical communication interfaces such as RS232, RS485, TCP/IP, CAN and USB. I have extensive experience with a wide variety of communication protocols such as Modbus RTU/TCP, CAN (Open), OPC and many custom protocols.Ferntech was formerly known as Infinite Fingers GmbH.

I focused mainly on the grid integration of renewable energy technologies. My project portfolio covered many areas including:* Working with large scale lithium-ion batteries with an emphasis on communication and control using the CANOpen protocol.* The development of an energy management system for controlling large scale battery inverters (50 and 200 kVA) which was achieved using LabVIEW and Beckhoff PLCs.* Certification of commercial inverters (required before being allowed to sell devices in Germany).* Verification of PV module energy yields.* Analysis of electric vehicle driving profiles and energy consumption. Data partially gathered using Vector GL1000 CAN dataloggers.* Laboratory development in preparation for research work with an emphasis on inter-device communication with OPC-UA

I completed my EUREC masters in renewable energy engineering degree at Fraunhofer IWES (formerly ISET) and am on an extended student contract until the end of March 2010. I'm now working on a project involving the grid integration of renewable energy generators, loads and storage.

Dissertation Title:"Design and Implementation of a Flexible Distributed Energy Management System to Investigate the Grid Integration of Controllable Distributed Energy Units."Copies available at the following links:* [Dissertation: summary](https://eurec.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/roy_emmerich-eurec_dissertation-summary_paper-final.pdf)* [Dissertation: full length](https://eurec.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/roy_emmerich-eurec_dissertation-final.pdf)* [Final presentation](https://eurec.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/roy_emmerich-eurec_dissertation-final_presentation_v2.pdf)* [Final presentation: associate animation](http://mydisk.se/royemmerich/webpage/roy_emmerich_eurec_dissertation-presentation_animation.avi)* [Zip archive: source code](http://mydisk.se/royemmerich/webpage/eurec_master_thesis-roy_emmerich.zip)---This work is distributed under the [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

The EUREC Masters (http://master.eurec.be) is an 18 month MSc programme focusing on the fundamentals of renewable energies, designed for scientists and engineers intending to pursue a professional career in this field. The PPRE or Postgraduate Programme Renewable Energy (http://www.ppre.de), as part of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität and a member of the EUREC Masters, was both the degree granting university as well as the host for the 6 month long introduction module.The University of Kassel hosted the 6 month long specialisation in hybrid systems.I completed the 6 month long thesis (described above) at Fraunhofer IWES, Kassel, Germany.

From experience gained working for the Southern African Large Telescope - SALT project team (http://www.salt.ac.za) I was invited to apply for the position as IT manager for the South African Astronomical Observatory - SAAO (http://www.saao.ac.za). Being the majority shareholder in the SALT consortium and the hosting institution for the SALT telescope, the SAAO is mandated with its operation and maintenance. My responsibility was to maintain the IT infrastructure for this and a number of other telescopes at the main operational site near Sutherland in the Northern Cape province as well as the headquarters in Observatory, Cape Town.My role also included collaborating with the other SALT partners based at a variety of universities and research institutes across the globe.

I was part of the software engineering team responsible for designing and implementing the telescope control system for the Southern African Large Telescope - SALT (http://www.salt.ac.za). My main function was to develop a Java telescope simulation tool for remote observing proposal submissions. I also did a bit of LabVIEW programming, became involved with Linux system administration and assisted with the design and implementation of the SALT science database (MySQL).

Peralex specialises in the development of high tech direction finding radio frequency communication equipment. I focused on the development of the Java front end user interface software for testing and operating the equipment.

I took a 1.5 year sabbatical from my engineering career to design, implement and operate a church youth programme.

MBB is an agricultural engineering consultancy. As a trainee engineer I was involved in a wide range of projects from dimensioning farm irrigation projects, CAD drawing, winery design and even the development of an innovative, large scale composting operation.

Upon completing my bachelor engineering degree I took a 3 year sabbatical to see the world. During my travels I performed a wide variety of jobs such as:• Herding cattle on horseback in the Australian Outback• Driving tractors and general farm labour in England• Picking apples and mowing lawns in New Zealand• Cleaning homes in the UK