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Back to Our Work

Visualizing Water Savings with Internet-Connected Commercial Kitchen Equipment

Modernizing Poultry Farms with Internet Connected Feed Level Monitoring

Little Bird Systems approached Lofty Labs to create a customer facing application to allow users to monitor data generated by their innovative audio-based sensors for feed bins in the poultry industry. The team had deployed sensors on multiple farms and were storing data in a database, but had no user interface for analytics, reporting, or even internal oversight. The team also anticipated large scaling challenges with their architecture in the short term future as they prepared a large go-to-market strategy for their IoT (Internet of Things) enabled sensors.

LOFTY'S APPROACH
Little Bird Systems team during a discovery workshop at Lofty Labs Lofty Labs worked with the team at Little Bird Systems to re-architect the pipeline of their sensor data using a standardized API (Application Programming Interface) over the internet, allowing their devices to passively push data into the cloud. The API became the standard interface for retrieving data as well, and Lofty developed an interactive reporting interface to surface insights to Little Bird System’s customers. The API and analytics application support an ACL model that allows for flexible governance of data access where Little Bird's employees and customers can access only the data they are granted, without compromising the confidential data of other customers. LBS On ScreenLittle Bird's IoT infrastructure is now poised for massive scaling and sensors are being rolled out to multiple commercial farms. The API powered dashboard is in use by LBS employees, farm employees, and integration partners to efficiently monitor and replenish feed levels. Native mobile applications are now in development, taking advantage of the API at the architecture's core to provide consistent experience across devices. These applications can be developed at a substantially reduced cost as they leverage a pre-existing cloud architecture and data access. Little Bird Systems is now confidently approaching some of the largest poultry integrators in the world with the knowledge that their automated systems can scale to meet demands of any size

Recycled Hydro Solutions' innovative RinseWell product saves water. It saves a lot of water. In fact, it saves so much water that when RHS approached Lofty Labs to build a dashboard showcasing the savings, our team had to craft an innovative visualization to demonstrate just how efficient the device is.

RHS needed a cloud-based tool to remotely monitor and collect data from each of their devices deployed in the field. Using this data, RHS dreamed of a dashboard that restaurant owners would proudly display front-of-house to advertise their eco-friendly kitchen practices.

Lofty built a cloud-based analytics application using Python and Django which allows real time data from the RinseWell devices to be consumed by a GraphQL API interface. This platform allowed our team to construct tools that RHS can use to monitor their devices in real time. The Lofty Labs team designed a system of dashboards, built with Vue.js, which can demonstrate the real time water savings of devices at a particular location. We designed the dashboard to use a comparison narrative--what RinseWell used, vs. what a traditional dipper well would have used--using a one gallon jug as a common visual representation that is meaningful to a everyone.

RHS featured the RinseWell dashboard in the vendor hall of the National Restaurant Associations annual expo in Chicago, connected to a live device in a popular espresso bar. The comparative visualization is very often staggering -- for every fraction of a gallon consumed by a RinseWell Smart Eco Rinse device, a traditional dipper well would have consumed dozens of gallons.

The platform is being expanded iteratively to roll up dashboards for multi-store customers who want to visualize their savings cross-store or even cross-region, as well as adding tools that assist RHS in the service and maintenance of its growing fleet of deployed devices.