Smart Crane Monitoring App#
Hello everyone! This is an update on the Smart Crane Monitoring App project at Demola Tampere.
About the Project#
More information about the project can be found here. Previous blog posts about the project can be found in the same page.
Our Progress#
In the beginning of the project, one of the first things we worked on was the project playbook. It was reviewed in a meeting at Konecranes HQ, in which we also showed a draft application demoing sensor interaction. We also got to play with the industrial cranes in the testing facility (photos were not allowed). We had lots of fun!
Our team at Konecranes Headquarters
Next, we worked on the design of the user interface and defined the main interaction patterns and functionality of the application. We had weekly Skype meetings with our client for delivering updates on the progress. The skeleton of the app was laid out and choices concerning tools and libraries were made.
In the last weeks#
A lot of work went into documenting use cases for the application, as these are one of the main deliverables of the project. We faced some delays in this process but implementation marched on. Qt 5.x was chosen as the main library for app development, with the QtSql and QtMultimedia modules enabled, as well as the new WebEngine module in Qt 5.4. The libraries zbar and qchart are going to be used for reading Qr Codes and plotting graphs, respectively. The application is running on Android smoothly.
The backend uses MySQL Server 5 for all storage tasks. Currently there is no managed interface to the database. Acess control and data commiting is done solely through the MySQL driver, using users and roles from the DB system itself. All operations done by the client application are pure SQL queries. Some screenshots of the app running on the IDE and target devices:
Development Environment
App in action