The employees in Hexagon’s Leuven office in Belgium were given the opportunity to put their creativity and development skills to the test at our internal Hackathon on February 21-22. During the event, each team had just 24 hours to develop the project of their dreams. Let’s take a closer look at one of our participating teams.
Pre-sales Engineers Sebastiaan Helsen and Felipe Carillo Romero’s project, called “ACEd it,” had a name just as interesting as the project itself.
Colloquially, to “ace it” means to accomplish something successfully. However, for Sebastiaan and Felipe’s project, ACE refers to the Automated Carillo Experience.
Wait, the what?
The Automated Carillo Experience: How It Came to Be
As part of the Pre-Sales team, both Sebastiaan and Felipe know that automation is the latest in modern innovation. Any task can be accomplished more efficiently when it is automated.
Working in an office, they also experienced firsthand the often painful effects of a job that requires you to repeatedly click a mouse.
Ridiculous, you say? Think again!
On average, office workers click their mouse roughly 5,000 times per day; however, many of them don’t even get to take 5,000 steps a day. Fingers and wrists are not adapted to regularly perform such intensive work. So, using a mouse all day for small, exact movements stresses and overworks these sensitive muscles. Overuse of these muscles can cause aches and soreness all the way from the fingertips to the neck.
This strain is what gave Sebastiaan and Felipe the idea to automate as many clicks as possible in a solution workflow as their Hackathon project. The goal of the Automated Carillo Experience was to embrace the technical innovation of automation while lessening the physical strain caused by repetitive office work.
ACE in Action
Even though it only takes seven clicks to go from data to service in the LuciadFusion server solution, team ACEd it wanted to fully leverage the new RESTful API from the Luciad Portfolio V2018.1 update in their project. To do so, they automated the workflow from data to application by inserting a USB stick loaded with their project data. Seconds later, all the data was available through a service in the LuciadRIA browser solution.
The video below demonstrates the whole process, starting with a USB drive containing two data folders (Haiti with 30 TIFF files and the U.S. with various SHP files). Connecting the USB drive triggers the script and automatically adds the drive as a data root for LuciadFusion. LuciadFusion then crawls all the data and sets up web services. The data is directly visualized in LuciadRIA, with the appropriate styling applied. Zooming in on Haiti, we can even see that multiple tile files have been combined conveniently into one layer.
Congratulations, Sebastiaan and Felipe! Your project really aced it.
To learn more about LuciadFusion, have a look at the One Minute Data Manager webinar. Stay tuned on the Sensing Smart Change blog for more inside looks into the 2019 Hackathon in Leuven (and to find out the winner)!
