RV Halo Smart IoT Platform for Winegard
Overview
About Winegard Company
Winegard is an American technology company and leader in designing and manufacturing connectivity solutions. For over 65 years, Winegard Company has provided innovative and creative wireless solutions for work, leisure, and everything in between. From working with NASA on the Apollo 11 mission to the cutting-edge cloud, AI, and 5G technologies, Winegard strives to connect people.
I’m most impressed with Saritasa’s flexibility. We have our own engineering practices within our company, and they are really flexible about working with our mentality and adapting to and following our established processes.
Saritasa follows all the modern DevOps practices. Generally, before we launch a product, we test it through three or four different stages. The Saritasa team follows best practices with Crashlytics and logging and is very thorough about checking and responding to events. Because of this, we have very limited exposure to bugs and crashes.
Scott BlindtDirector of Cloud Services at the Winegard Company
Their Challenge
Winegard has always been a hardware and manufacturing company, but recently they’ve embraced becoming a smart technology company. As software requires a different skill set from their years of experience, they needed a partner well-versed in complicated software development to help with their shift. They wanted a partner that wouldn’t just build what they told them to, but a team to work with and foster a culture of innovation within Winegard.
Our Solution
At Saritasa, we’re not order-takers. We act like consultants, advisors, and a technology team for our clients – which was exactly what Winegard was looking for. Winegard came to us looking for a company to help manage not only our team, but theirs as well, to implement software development processes and culture.
Our relationship started with an RV-focused smart home Internet of Things (IoT) project. RV Halo is an AI-enabled voice assistant made to help consumers control and monitor their RVs.
Our Approach
What Saritasa Did
Native iOS & Android Apps
The RV Halo apps were built natively for both iOS and Android devices, using Swift and Kotlin respectively. With the apps, Winegard customers are able to connect all their enabled devices, allowing them to control security cameras, temperature settings, the RV-C interface, and more. For example, users could get notified when their refrigerator gets unplugged during travel and their food is at risk.
IoT Platform Development
The project didn’t end at mobile apps – we built an entire IoT system including both mobile and web apps. The front end of the system was built using React.JS. The system uses artificial intelligence to recognize voice commands. Users can tell RV Halo to “Set up camp” and it will deploy awnings, turn on lights, level the RV – and anything else the user has set up. The system even works offline when users aren’t connected to the internet.
Hybrid Project Management
This project was not our typical engagement – when Winegard requested a partner to help bring software to their company, they didn’t just mean the delivery. Our project manager managed not only our team, but the client’s developers as well. Both of our teams worked in sync for the design and development of the project. Winegard handled all the connectivity, while Saritasa handled the frontend, including the design, site map, onboarding, app development, and management of the overall project.
Ongoing Support & Maintenance
Our team works with Winegard ongoing to provide support and maintenance to the mobile app and IoT platform. We’re also working together on several additional projects, having proved ourselves with the initial app project. The current apps are consumer-focused, but future plans include fleet management and other business-oriented solutions.
