Engineering
Blog

Technical deep dives, lessons learned, and engineering decisions from the team building HOP Sensors. Raw, honest, and built for engineers.

Deep Dive May 11, 2026 · 8 min read

Why We Chose TimescaleDB Over InfluxDB for SCADA Telemetry Storage

After evaluating six time-series databases against our requirements — sub-second writes, complex aggregations, and SQL compatibility — here's what we found and why we landed on Timescale.

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Architecture April 28, 2026 · 6 min read

Building a Protocol-Agnostic SCADA Connector: Lessons from DNP3 and IEC 61850

Industrial protocols weren't designed with cloud integration in mind. Here's how we built an abstraction layer that handles Modbus, DNP3, IEC 61850, and OPC-UA without custom code for each deployment.

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ML & AI April 12, 2026 · 10 min read

Per-Substation Anomaly Detection: Why One Model Per Site Beats a Global Model

Grid substations have wildly different baseline behaviors depending on geography, load patterns, and connected infrastructure. We explain why we train individual models and how we manage the cold start problem.

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Infrastructure March 30, 2026 · 5 min read

Getting to Sub-50ms Alert Latency: Our Grafana + Alertmanager Setup

The path from raw telemetry to ops team notification is longer than you'd think. We trace every hop in our alerting pipeline and show where we shaved latency.

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Security March 15, 2026 · 7 min read

Connecting to Air-Gapped OT Networks: Our Secure Data Diode Approach

Electric utilities run critical infrastructure on air-gapped operational technology networks — and for good reason. Here's how we bridge that gap without compromising security posture.

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