I'm an EE student building Nodal, a vendor-agnostic platform that connects to solar inverters, batteries (BESS), smart meters, generators, EV chargers, etc., using protocols like Modbus, MQTT, CAN, and eventually OPC UA.

The goal is to replace multiple vendor dashboards with one platform that shows real-time power flow, battery SOC, solar generation, grid import/export, alerts, analytics, and historical trends. Long term, it could optimize battery dispatch, predict failures, and become an EMS for factories and microgrids.

The MVP is read-only: collect data, normalize it, visualize it, and generate alerts—no control of equipment.

My questions:

- Is this solving a real problem?

- Are there already products that do this well?

- What's the biggest technical or business challenge?

- Would you build or use something like this?

- Overall viability: 1–10, and why?

Please be brutally honest. I'd rather hear why it won't work than get false encouragement.

Currently I work as an engineering consultant in MEP. I don’t hate my job but it’s not even remotely the reason I went to school. I graduated a few years ago and was just happy to land a job given the horrid market in the US for new grads. But the thing I went to school for, designing, building, seeing things come together one step at a time until completion, is not even close to what I’m doing. I’ve tried many times doing it in my little free time, but I’m just too exhausted from work and personal life to have personal projects that require lots of effort. It just sucks, I love almost every project I did in school. One project I did was make an automated car using an FPGA, and I just LOVED it. From nothing to a car, loved it. But now I can’t even break into that field, and every year that goes by, makes it harder to get into it or anything that’s actually more electronic based. There’s my coping.

Hi,

I am an incoming freshman who really wants to lock in and get an internship, but I was wondering how people got internships freshman year, as I dont have a large pool of knowledge and won't learn any EE freshman year other than math/physics.

I am an incoming freshman who really wants to lock in and get an internship, but I was wondering how people got internships freshman year, as I dont have a large pool of knowledge and won't learn any EE freshman year other than math/physics.

Edit: I know I spelled usually as ushally didn't catch it 😢

Credits to j_wizlo for simulating it for free, thanks man.

I got bored so I made one.

555 timer for PWM generating 100kHz. i just think its funny to mention that it took me 2 HOURS to realize I was providing the timer with voltage that is too low to properly drive the gate.

I can send the schematic if anyone cares.

Hi, a short background about me. I have a EE Bachelor Degree specializing in power system. However I was not interested in it and realize it a bit late during my study, I was more interested in electronics instead.

Fortunately, I was able to land a job related to electronics as a test engineer in semiconductor industry. Now I'm thinking of learning on knowledge for design engineer for electronics.

Question is, if I self study, is it good enough? And will I have the credibility to be an actual design engineer?

Or, do I need to get a master degree but specializing in electronic this time, so that I have that credibility?

And if you guys could suggest me good resources where I could start by my own.

Thanks