Omnis Studio is a great tool for building web & mobile apps for commercial distribution, as well as creating applications for many other uses & sectors, including not-for-profit and education – added to this, if you are new to application design, or following an IT or Programming course through school or college, then Omnis Studio provides a great environment in which to learn application building skills and coding. On the blog today, we’d like to bring you news of a great and timely project by Maurin Wannags, one of our Tech Support team in Germany and a college student in Hamburg, that shows how useful Omnis Studio can be in any educational setting – let Maurin explain the project and the highly functional app he and his fellow students created using Omnis Studio.
My experiences using Omnis Studio
For the past year and a half, I have been an IT specialist application development trainee at Omnis Software Germany, while also taking IT lessons at a vocational college in Hamburg, the Berufliche Schule ITECH Elbinsel Wilhelmsburg. As part of a college project “Living with the virus”, we were asked to implement a solution to a problem related to the Covid pandemic.
Our student project team (Finn Stirnemann, Felix Malchau, Philipp Bangert and myself) found that during the pandemic the need for anti-bacterial or disinfectant “hand-gel”, and their dispensers (‘Desinfektionsmittel’ in German FYI), has increased dramatically, but that they can become empty all too quickly – those responsible for these dispensers may not even notice when the containers have become empty…
To solve this problem, our team created “AutoDessi”, an automated hand-gel dispenser that measures its hand-gel fill level automatically via a sensor and writes it to a database. Our solution also includes a web application that evaluates and graphically displays the data from the database.
The solution is designed to ensure that there is always enough hand-gel available by informing the staff responsible for the dispensers when the level in a dispenser falls below a certain minimum quantity. At the same time, this avoids unnecessary maintenance rounds, as staff only need to refill the dispensers that are actually almost empty!
Our experience in programming Omnis Studio
We only had three and a half weeks for the entire project. In addition to assembling and testing the hardware (hand-gel dispenser, sensors, Raspberry Pi board), programming the database (PostgreSQL) and the project documentation, there was only one week to develop the web application including the UI.
Therefore, we decided to develop the app in Omnis Studio using the current version 10.2. Since Omnis has fast prototyping features, and is very productive and powerful, we were able to program the required functionality and to create a comprehensive and graphically appealing interface within only a few days.
Project Success
The resulting integrated Omnis Web application created has several functions:
- A minimum level can be defined for each hand-gel dispenser.
- When the minimum level is reached in a dispenser, the maintenance team receive an email notification automatically.
- The web app also provides usage statistics, programmed and visualized using the JavaScript components in Omnis Studio.
Even though we did not have a lot of time, our web app is quite powerful and innovative: it evaluates the data from the database and displays it graphically using JavaScript Remote forms and JS components. The notification function can be customized and an SMTP Worker Object in Omnis Studio takes care of sending the notifications by email.
Maurin Wannags