Mind4Energy

The Customer

Mind4Energy is a engineering company that develops dedicated monitoring soft- and hardware for rooftop solar installations and utility scale solar parks. Their mission? Facilitating the supply of reliable and sustainable energy. The Ghent University spin-off is a turnkey provider in this field and has already built a portfolio of international customers.

The Challenge

New partnerships allowed Mind4Energy to expand sales and increase internationalisation. The exponential growth of both the company and its client portfolio put the existing monitoring and data system under enormous pressure. That’s why the architecture of the platform had to be revised thoroughly.

The Quest

To be able to grasp the challenges of Mind4Energy and the sector-wide approach, we started our research phase by collecting insights and data through in-depth interviews and meetings. After that, we presented a first architectural plan to be tested. A prototype like this is the best way to implement usability testing into the early stages of development

The Result

Based on those new insights and user feedback, we worked on a new micro-service architecture and digital roadmap. Focussed on architecture, performance and user interface design. At the same time, we started choosing and implementing the suitable technologies and frameworks. Thanks to this flexible approach, we ended up with a perfect blueprint for further development of the new platform.

Technologies used

  1. Angular for building the right UI’s.
  2. Nodejs for parsing the real time data and building restful microservices.
  3. Influxdb for storing and querying the real time data.
  4. Docker for deploying/building our container environments.
  5. Amazon web services for hosting the platform.
  6. Kafka as messaging backbone.
  7. Resin.io for remote onsite deployment.
  8. Good old MongoDb as our favorite document store.