Customer
The international company provides instrumentation and software specialized for multi-parameter, mixed-signal data acquisition, measurement, and control. The company's products are used in more than 25 countries in various industries such as automotive, rail, aerospace, civil, mechanical engineering, and others.

Challenge
The customer produces test and measurement systems and handles a large number of sensors. Information about the sensor includes its type, specific characteristics such as measurement units, information about calibration, measuring range, and others. Quick and easy access to this data simplifies the work of operators and speeds up the process of adjusting the measuring system.
The challenge was to create a centralized sensor database with applications allowing operators to facilitate the identification of a certain sensor and speed up tuning the measuring system.

Solution
For the project start-up, the customer described the user scenarios and the user interface layouts. Based on the specified requirements our engineers proposed the solution architecture and selected development tools.
The system had to maximally simplify the process of handling sensors. The user has to be able to quickly find information about the sensor in the database, edit sensor parameters, present measured values into a suitable format, get an alert if calibration and service intervals are exceeded.

The system consists of the following components:

  • Centralized sensor database,
  • iOS/Android applications,
  • Web-based control panels for data editing, and access control.

The centralized database provides flexible and scalable access to information about a large collection of sensors. The database can be accessed from a desktop computer or mobile device. The server application is deployed as a Docker container, so the database can be located both in the cloud and on the local network.
The mobile app is designed to quickly identify a specific sensor and obtain information about its characteristics. The search for a certain sensor in the database can be done by entering specified parameters, serial numbers, or by scanning a barcode, RFID code that is attached to the product. The application provides convenient sorting and filtering functionality.
We implemented the mobile app using Xamarin.Forms for building iOS and Android versions from a single codebase.
The Control panels are used to manage user permissions and provide extended sensor editing functionality. Authorized users can add/remove sensors, edit parameters, change calibration info, etc. via Web interface or mobile application.

Results
Our engineers have closely cooperated with the customer and made several iterations, gradually improving the solution. Initially, our partner had used applications only for in-house operations. After a while, the customer decided to convert it to a commercial product to provide this convenient functionality for their clients.