Lumen won a contract to develop a wireless charging system for McLaren’s amazing new hybrid Speedtail supercar. The system would feature a wireless charging pad that would be placed underneath the car in the owner’s garage, together with a wall box which included an android tablet display to inform the driver if the car was lined up directly on top of the battery and alert them to the battery status.
In order to focus on what they did best - building their brilliant wireless charging hardware - Lumen needed help to develop the software interface to display the vehicle alignment and charging information on the Android tablet. The software would use a combination of both bluetooth and wireless connectivity - the charging floor pad would be connected to the wall box by bluetooth, while the car would be connected to the wall box by wifi. Lumen also needed to have an app available for both Android and iOS that would display the same information as the wallbox display.
The project was offered via tender process and Fitzroy IT was chosen as the winner for several important reasons including our ability to develop both Android and iOS applications, our ability to work with both bluetooth and wifi wireless communication standards, and our extensive knowledge of AWS microservices.
Fitzroy IT put forward AWS as the preferred solution for the application infrastructure due to the largest range of unique microservices offered, the best cost and best reliability of any option. It was clearly the best fit for this project, and in addition the end customer (McLaren) already was using AWS but wasn’t currently leveraging it to its full potential.
Fitzroy IT built an app for the Android tablets that are provided to customers along with their wireless charging stations. The tablet app helps the driver align their car correctly over the wireless charging pad, and also reports the state of charging to the driver. As the charging state changes, the data is sent via API Gateway to an AWS Lambda processing function that queues the incoming notifications and sends them out to the associated mobile devices in close-to-real-time.
Although it involved working with a completely new technology, Fitzroy IT successfully delivered on the challenging project brief , including building the application according to initial requirements as well as successfully delivering a range of charge requests. The wireless charging system was deployed successfully, and Lumen is confident that their technology will be adopted in more mass market production vehicles in the near future. They were so happy with the work that Fitzroy IT had performed that they have come back with more quotation requests for upcoming projects.
API Gateway
Lambda
DynamoDB
SQS
SNS
CloudWatch
iOS App - Swift
Android App - Java
Bluetooth Core Specification 2.0-4.2
Test
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