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The gateway that kept dying.
The challenge
Units died in the
field. Nobody
knew why.
PM Africa Field Services — better known by their trading name, Predictive Maintenance — deploys monitoring gateways at industrial sites: hardware that watches machines so machines don't fail unannounced. Except the watchers themselves kept dying.
Units came back permanently dead. Water damage was suspected. The gateway was manufactured overseas, with no local design support and a repair bill dispute hanging on one question: what actually killed it?
Nuteknix was engaged to answer that question — and then to make sure it never needed asking again.
What Nuteknix did
Find the killer.
Then design it out.
A forensic investigation first, an engineering fix second, a certificate third.
Forensic failure investigation
Systematic teardown and bench analysis of a failed unit — isolating each module, tracing the damage path, and ruling out the suspected water ingress entirely.
Root cause, with certainty
The verdict: overvoltage through the Ethernet cable. Connecting the unit to a Power-over-Ethernet source fed voltage straight into an unprotected 5V rail — destroying the processor and power converter. A design oversight in the original product, not installer carelessness or weather.
Design review of the original
The investigation also surfaced undersized protection components and misleading power specifications — documented in a formal report that settled the liability question with evidence, not opinion.
Power supply redesigned
Within the original enclosure's space constraints: proper overvoltage crowbar protection, reverse-polarity protection on every input, and correctly rated components throughout.
Resilience by design
The new supply accepts 6.5 to 57 volts — so a PoE connection, the wrong plug-pack, undervoltage or reversed wiring can no longer kill it. The exact mistake that destroyed its predecessors is survivable by design — and demonstrated in every power configuration the compliance lab tested.
ICASA type approval
EMC interference resolved with proper decoupling and input filtering, then the modified unit passed the full ICASA requirements — international safety (IEC 62368-1) and EMC (ETSI EN 301 489) standards — in every power configuration.
In-house tested. Field trial next.
Certification is one thing; the client's own bench is another. The redesigned unit has been through Predictive Maintenance's in-house testing and met expectations. The next proving ground is a field trial at live industrial sites — the same environment that killed the originals — and this page will grow as that record does.
In the client's words
“Nuteknix was a perfect fit for my requirements. ‘Professional and concise’ solving the issues we were experiencing with the product supplied, to ensure that we could now stake our reputation on the improvements with our clients. Great to see that there are still companies out there with your work ethics.”
Robert K Venter
PM Africa Field Services cc · from his Google review
Have a product that keeps failing in the field?
Let's fix it
for good.
willem@nuteknix.co.za ↗Benoni, Gauteng
South Africa