Software Development for Soil Measurement Product
Benefits for the business as a result of delivering this solution include:
- Advances getting the product to market
- An intuitive user experience through the UI
- Improved operator experience through built in operational logic
- A software partner with practical product knowledge gained through testing
- Physical product validation through off site testing
Background to the project
Our customer required a software application to support the development of their product for soil strength and stiffness measurements. This project supported the initial development stages of the product to enable testing to be conducted in the field on real use customer cases, ultimately progressing the journey to market.
Solution in detail
The hardware for this product utilises RS485 serial data communication between the software and the hardware. A custom protocol was to enable data to be retrieved from and sent to the devices in the product. The protocol was designed by the customer and refined through collaboration during the design stage of the project.
Rotary encoders were utilised to determine the depth of the device into the ground and other sensors were deployed in a device down the hole to measure relevant properties. A specific flow of messages was required to initiate and then interact with the hardware, all defined and tested in collaboration with the customer. This include definition of bytes in the messaging and how to interpret and construct them in communication.
There were a number of different logging methods that were required to enable different types of testing\analysis to be enabled. Ensuring acquisition rates were sufficiently scaled to the analysis requirements and data was robustly transmitted from the device into a downloadable file for post processing and analysis.
One of the key objectives was configurability, to enable changes to be made to how the software functions without having to change the source code. This resulted in a configuration screen to enable parameters to be adjusted. This ranged from the aesthetics of the graph to how the channels are labelled on the UI to what channels are displayed in the Live Channels view.
The Engineering Director of the business we were working with made this comment about working with Argenta, “Argenta was the ideal partner for the project; thoughtful, flexible, professional and timely. The final product exceeded our expectations!”. If you think we can help you with your product development or measurement system, get in touch.
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