BuyRocks
IoT tablet app controlling a motorised shopping trolley over industrial protocols
- $1.8B+
- market cap of Ferrotec, the client's industrial partner
- 7
- other industrial partners
The story
BuyRocks is a German industrial startup. We built its tablet app for the factory floor, which manages several industrial machines over Wi-Fi using the industry's standard machine-communication protocols.
This is the unglamorous end of mobile work. There is no app store listing and no sign-up flow, just a device in a working plant that has to be right.
The company behind it went on to partner with Ferrotec, a manufacturer worth more than a billion dollars, and seven other industrial partners.
What was hard, and how we solved it
Problem
Software waits on hardware
The app has to be written and tested long before there are finished physical units to try it on.
Machines speak their own language
Industrial equipment does not talk the way consumer apps expect, and the gap has to be bridged properly.
One screen, several devices
A single interface has to see and control more than one unit without anything falling out of sync.
Solution
Tested against simulation
The app ran against simulated devices, so behaviour was proven before real hardware was in the room.
Industrial protocols built in
The tablet talks straight to the hardware over the same industrial protocols the machines already use.
Multi-device management
One app connects over Wi-Fi and manages several devices at once from a single screen.
Inside the app
