AirstarClient work
BLE based controller app for premium tailor-made lighting devices
- UX Design
- UI Design
- iOS Development
- Android Development
- IoT Development
Airstar, the inventor of the lighting balloons concept, is the world leader in designing and producing inflatable lighting technologies for various industries from entertainment to aerospace, construction, events, and film.
About the project
Airstar partnered with us to design and develop a set of native Android and iOS mobile apps that offer an intuitive way of controlling light shows and events, synchronizing hundreds of lighting devices, replacing the cumbersome physical control panels and cables.
Following an initial workshop with the client, our team of designers and developers has worked closely together to discover all possibilities this project could offer.
To avoid technical difficulties down the line, we held what we call solution design workshops where we identified risks in terms of managing multiple BLE devices and found a good solution to put the functionality of physical control panels onto a screen.
Core features
Network management
Define groups, add/remove devices, network configuration import/export
Brightness control
on network, group, and device level
Quick blackout
Animations
Ambience
Network configuration import/export
Custom, user-defined color palette
How it works
When the Airstar application is opened, the user can decide to connect to an active network or proceed offline using a new and empty network setup.
Light operations like choosing the animation type, brightness, color, and frequency can differ device by device based on its physical capabilities and can only be performed when connected to a network.
Actions like defining groups, adding, renaming, or moving lighting devices to different groups are supported in offline mode and can be synchronized with the network once the device is connected to the MESH.
Technological challenges
Determining the communication protocol for the hardware device
Solution: We defined our own protocol on top of the GATT communication protocol that’s optimal for both the mobile and the hardware side, and built it in a way that makes it possible to support next-generation and completely custom-built Airstar products. Using the GATT profile for communication between the BLE devices, each device had a set of connection and data transfer characteristics and a packet size that had to be taken into consideration in the communication between the BLE device and the mobile app.
Syncing mechanism with the MESH network
Having multiple users connect to the network and modify the same configurations demanded the implementation of a mechanism that would not only sync the offline changes with the MESH network when going online but would apply them correctly and achieve consistency between the locally stored cache and the physical network.
