Overview
About Winegard Company
Winegard is an American technology company and leader in designing and manufacturing connectivity solutions. For over 65 years, the 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 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
The Challenge
Fostering innovation in the RV industry
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.
Designing 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 sought. We worked closely with their team to understand their goals and vision, and then translate that vision into a reality.
Story mapping
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. We used story mapping to create, define, and document the project scope and requirements to ensure both teams operated on the same page.
Wireframing
Our team brainstormed concepts to incentivize regular, recurring user engagements in a way that felt rewarding and natural. The result is an in-app badge system that encourages users to create social “caravans” with friends and family and earn badges when they complete certain activities. Users may earn badges for visiting national parks, traveling distances, or using specific routes.
Design documentation
Winegard is a historic brand with a strong identity, so consistency was key to creating a successful mobile experience. Our team created detailed documentation for all the design elements to make it easy for the development team to implement.
Developing our solution
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. Winegard wanted a company to help manage not only our team, but theirs as well, to implement software development processes and culture. Our project manager worked directly with Winegard’s developers in parallel with our own.
Architecture
RV Halo is an entire IoT ecosystem, including mobile and web apps that connect directly with and control physical devices. While the primary audience for RV Halo is the RV market, the actual underlying software is designed to scale for multiple different vehicles, including semi-trucks, boats, and more. This required a solid foundation and a system designed and built from the ground up.
Development
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.
Ongoing Support & Maintenance
Our team works with Winegard 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.
