Engineering Matters

Engineering Matters


#335 Monitoring Methane: The Tech Behind the Tech 

June 26, 2025

LongPath Technologies has taken Nobel-winning discoveries, and applied them to a key cause of climate change: methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. The sector now turns to LongPath to establish monitoring across facilities. But as LongPath sought to scale from innovation to commercialization, it turned to Red Pitaya for a vital component.

In this episode we tell the story of LongPath, and how their laser-based methane monitoring has been developed over the past decade. We learn how this work was enabled by a cheap and highly configurable processing board from Red Pitaya. And we discover why Red Pitaya was chosen as a Gold Champion at the Engineering Matters Awards.

This highly configurable board, much like a Raspberry Pi for scientists and engineers, is cheap enough that it can be used by start-ups and school students alike. In an Awards shortlist episode we saw how school students have used it in experiments at CERN. And it is flexible and powerful enough that it can meet the needs of innovators like those at LongPath.

Guests

Črt Valentinčič, co-founder, CTO, Red Pitaya

Robbie Wright, co-founder, Chief Engineer, LongPath Technologies

The post #335 Monitoring Methane: The Tech Behind the Tech  first appeared on Engineering Matters.