From concept through to hardware and software.
Wattli builds hardware and software and carries it past the point where research projects usually stop. Some of the work is for clients, and often starts as a consulting mandate. Some becomes a product of Wattli's own, sold directly or through a spin-off. Below are a few concrete examples.
DC microgrid
Around 750 million people live without electricity (IEA), and rural electrification comes in two shapes, each giving up what the other has. A solar home system is cheap to start and owned outright, but too small for cooking or a motorbike — and sizing it up is uneconomic, since it would sit oversized most of the day. A minigrid shares one large battery and one peak demand across many houses, but is expensive to build and hardest to finance where it is needed most.
The concept combines both. Each household starts with its own solar home system, then neighbours connect. Shared power lifts the peak available to any one home far beyond its own panel and battery — enough to cook on, which is a real health gain. And the grid grows one household at a time, at a cost a single household can carry — no top-down financing by a village, a government or an NGO.
Plug-and-play is the hard part: two neighbours connect with nobody in the middle — no grid operator keeping the bus stable, no bank settling what one household owes another. So the intelligence sits at the edge: a gateway converter in each home holds the shared bus steady, and a distributed ledger records the energy that crossed it — bookkeeping between neighbours where no bank operates.
A working proof of concept has been built and measured in the lab — a 48 V bus moving 200 W between households, with the converters controlling both power flow and grid voltage as expected. The design scales to higher voltage and power. Next comes a field test and a go-to-market strategy — Wattli plans to commercialise this itself.
A field test needs a field. If you work where this belongs, we should talk.
Developed with Hochschule Luzern – Technik & Architektur.
Agentic AI and software products
The same crossing, pointed at software. The interesting cases are wherever expert judgement is applied to documents, data and decisions all day long.
A digital property management platform
Agents handle the correspondence, documents and recurring case work of a real service business — an industry with no engineering content at all, which is precisely the point. In production since 2026.
LLMs in power electronics, early
Applying large language models in power electronics since 2024: a converter design tool shipped commercially in 2025 and in daily use, and AI applied to organisational workflows.
Simulation inside a product
A COMSOL simulation suite made to run inside a software product, so that finite-element results reach the people who need them without anyone opening a simulation package. In production since 2025 and still being extended.
Remote monitoring of rural electrification
PV off-grid systems power schools and health centres in remote regions of Ethiopia. Without monitoring, a system running badly — or not running at all — can go unnoticed for months, and the nearest technician may be a day of travel away.
The monitoring unit closes that loop: it works out for itself what it is connected to, reports over the mobile network, and puts the whole fleet on one screen — time series and a map. Because a site visit is expensive, it also updates itself over the air and reverses the update if anything goes wrong. A first prototype is in the field; the next version goes into field testing in early 2027, ahead of a wider rollout.
If you operate off-grid PV systems that deserve monitoring, the unit is ready — talk to us about a pilot.
Developed with Hochschule Luzern – Technik & Architektur; industry partner Sahay Solar.
Built, then measured.
Every project above has been built and put in front of reality — hardware that was measured, software running in production. That is a deliberate filter: the failure modes that matter only surface once something has to work outside the conditions it was designed in.
Much of the hardware work runs together with applied research at a university of applied sciences, which is what keeps a steady supply of results worth carrying across. The same development capacity is available under mandate — the software engagements above were exactly that.
Have something stuck at prototype stage?
Whether it is hardware that needs to survive the field or software that needs to survive real users — a short description is enough to start. Replies within 24 hours.
info@watt.li