The Servo

The Servo is the acting half of Energy Autopilot. Where the FMS works in the logical realm, the Servo works in the physical realm: it takes the assets the FMS manages conceptually and connects them to real-world control — speaking to your inverter, battery, EV charger and appliances directly, over your own local network.

Instant, in a way the cloud can never be

Because the Servo is in your home, it sees and responds to changes in your energy environment almost instantly. Cloud-only solutions physically cannot do this: every observation and command must cross the internet, through vendor clouds, with delays of seconds to minutes.

Here’s why that matters. Your grid connection is protected by a main circuit breaker, and modern electric homes can genuinely challenge it: an EV charging at full rate, the oven on, hot water heating and the air conditioner starting up can together demand more than your connection supplies. A cloud-only system can’t see that collision forming — and couldn’t act in time if it did. The Servo can, and does: it actively manages competing loads in the moment to protect your circuit breaker from tripping. No dark house, no walk to the switchboard, no interrupted charge.

No vendor clouds in your critical path

Most smart energy devices are controlled through their manufacturer’s cloud: your commands travel from your home to their servers and back to the device sitting metres from where you started. Chain several vendors’ clouds together and you’ve built your home’s automation on foundations you don’t control. That creates real risks: delays, connectivity failures, clouds that get shut down, degrade, or suddenly start charging for what was free — the trajectory Cory Doctorow memorably named enshittification.

The Servo bypasses all of it. It controls your devices directly on your LAN, with a single secure link back to the FMS. Your home keeps running sensibly when the internet drops, and no third party’s business decisions sit between you and your own equipment. That’s what we mean by agency: your hardware answers to you.

Hardware that disappears into your day

In keeping with our open source adjacent philosophy, we’ve made the Servo easy to have: an attractive, tiny, low-cost device — barely bigger than a matchbox — purpose-built to run the Servo software.

Installation is genuinely simple. The Servo lives behind your internet router and comes with two short cables: one plugs into any spare RJ45 ethernet port on your router, the other into a USB port for power. Each cable only fits its own socket — plug both in, and that’s it. No WiFi network to configure (or to go wrong later). The device starts up, phones home to the FMS, and everything from there — onboarding your solar, battery, charger and loads — happens in the FMS’s web interface.

Prefer to run your own metal? You can: the Servo software can also run happily on a Raspberry Pi that you supply.

The FMS decides. The Servo makes it real — register your interest to put one in your home when beta testing opens.