Customer Background
This US-based industry leader in elevator transportation solutions manufactures nearly all components used in today’s elevators, including elevator controls, door equipment, slings, car gates, and more. With offices across the US, UK, and Canada, their family of brands leverages a deep well of expertise and passion to create innovative, safe, and reliable elevator modernisation solutions for their customers.
Customer Need
To elevate operational efficiency and simplify elevator controller management, our customers wanted a highly intuitive and responsive graphical user interface (GUI) compatible with their existing hardware. Scalability for future technology updates and a visually captivating design with appealing colors and animation were also key requirements. Softdel’s expertise in designing user-friendly interfaces and 20+ years of elevator domain experience in delivering innovative IoT solutions across the technology spectrum made us the perfect choice of partner to develop this application.
Softdel’s Solution
- Before commencing with the interface design, Softdel undertook hardware validation, meticulously evaluating the existing hardware's compatibility with the proposed interface and suggested strategic changes to the hardware infrastructure to ensure seamless integration of the interface's advanced features.
- Application development began with a comprehensive blueprint outlining the graphic libraries and tools earmarked for UI design, followed by the subsequent steps in the development process, including:
- Designing multiple wireframes as per best UI/UX standards, clearly outlining the content for each screen.
- Developing python automation script to detect changes in the input parameter file and autogenerate XML file for interface updates thereby significantly reducing efforts.
- Managing 5000+ parameters with a touch screen interface, allowing users to easily edit settings such as door type, car speed, fault status, and alarm notifications.
- Enabling dynamic updating of images/animation based on back-end data.
- Softdel conducted end-to-end embedded and application testing, including unit and system testing, encompassing:
- Building test programs for the peripherals Heartbeat, LCD and Touchscreen, Flash memory, SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory), SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), UART (universal asynchronous receiver / transmitter), to validate the proposed hardware.
- Developing a test application to evaluate the display under consideration for performance of Graphics GUI, focusing on following specifics:
- Creating a test application using the powerful GUI designing software from STM microcontrollers – TouchGFX Designer.
- Developing software to test functionality of Display Touch responsiveness, Swipe, Drop down selection sample, and other possible gestures.
- Checking display color accuracy. Allowing change of displayed colors using touch interface.
- Providing a graphic sample with transitions.
Standards and Technology
Programming Language: Embedded C & C++, Python
UI Development Framework: TouchGFX
Front-end: C++
Back-end: C
H/W Platform: STM32H7 Series
Operating System: RTOS
Tools: STM32CubeIDE, TouchGFX Designer, BitBucket, JIRA
Benefits
- Future-proof flexibility: This solution's fully extensible architecture allowed the customer to evolve with changing business requirements, by enabling easy upgrades of parameters and functionalities whenever needed, eliminating the need for costly overhauls and limitations.
- Streamlined elevator monitoring and control: The touch controller simplified evaluation and maintenance of the elevator parameters optimizing operational control and efficiency.
- Enhanced usability: The intuitive UI ensured seamless navigation within the application, enabling users to complete tasks with minimal effort.
