A startup company recently came to us to ask us to produce a running demo of their concept.  The purpose of the demo was to show a potential investor what could be done – the investor wanted to see a proof of concept of their idea.  The major purpose of this demo was to prove the concept is technically feasible while showing your customer something tangible instead of a 2D presentation.

PROBLEM SET

The timeline was tight; the requirements were fluid.  The timing was of the highest priority, so while there was a list of prioritized requirements, we absolutely had to have something that worked on the delivery date, so each development task was incremental in implementation.

We needed to create a device tracking web service that gathered data from GPS devices, rendered it on a map and monitored the activity of the devices to alert the system of anomalies (too fast, too slow, out of expected area).

DEVELOPMENT TASKS

• We created a UDP server that parsed GPS data from field devices
• Set up an AWS EC2 instance running Ubuntu
• Set up a PostGIS database – the parsed GPS data was inserted into the database
• Created a WebSocket to communicate with connected clients, sending information on the GPS status or anomaly alerts
• Developed a REST API for device management
• Developed a responsive web client for a device monitoring dashboard
• All development tasks were written in Python and NodeJS, giving us the most flexibility for server portability

END RESULT

Our customer reported back that the demo was a success, securing the investment that they were looking for.  We handed off the demo server and source code, with instructions on how to use it.  We also wrote up our suggestions on things to add for future demos, or features for a working solution.