Where do I start with this absolute mega project? A local NE company provide radio communication control systems for industrial applications. But you don't just want any of your staff picking up a radio control device and operating your heavy machinery, so my client stepped in and locked these away in a secure cabinet with access through key cards.

But now they wanted to upgrade their platform and make everything truly cloud based. Their remit to me was to build a platform that could detect key cards behing presented on a remote transmitter and then for it to run through a series of checks before giving a pass or fail back to the transmitter.

The whole hardware aspect was new to me, so was a bit of a challenge, but the cloud office was a cinch. Let me talk you through it all.

My first task was to detect the card being presented to a transmitter and this was by first experience of working with the CAN network and I called this part of the project Connect. (Yeah I know it's not massively original!) As this had to run locally on their client's premises then the easiest method for this was to make it a windows application.

Using .Net Windows Forms the Connect platform constantly scans the CAN network for devices and cards being presented. If found, then it needs to work out if the card is valid and this is where the magic starts. Taking the card Id and machine Id, it then sends off an API call to the Hub.

The Hub does loads of checks to see if the card is valid, active, the machine is active, if the card is assigned to an operator, if the operator has training for this machine, if this is the operator's shift, has the machine been inspected and many others. If it passes everything then an acknowledgement is passed back to the transmitter allowing control over the machine.

The Hub does loads of checks to see if the card is valid, active, the machine is active, if the card is assigned to an operator, if the operator has training for this machine, if this is the operator's shift, has the machine been inspected and many others. If it passes everything then an acknowledgement is passed back to the transmitter allowing control over the machine.

But for all of these checks to happen, there needs to be someway for all this data to be uploaded. So the Hub allows the following to be managed:

• Clients
• Operators
• Cards
• Machines and their locations
• Training
• Shifts
• Reports
• Diagnostics

Every single check that is performed is backed by data uploaded by the customer and they can fully manage all of this themselves through the Hub. It's all written in.Net v9 and cloud based so it can be managed from any device, anywhere in the world.

In addition, managers of multi-national companies can view logs and reports directly from their own location without needing staff to send information over.

I've just scratched the surface of this mega project, but it probably took around 5 months to build with full testing, demo and upgrades.