u-blox is building a better future with IoT technology that connects people and machines

In brief

Customer

u-blox

Challenge u-blox wanted to improve the user experience, onboarding and development capabilities of u-center.

Results The renewed u-center 2 is user-friendly, intuitive and built on modern web technologies.

Benefits With u-center 2 renewal, u-blox customers can better evaluate the performance of their products.

Nitor partnered up with u-blox, a leading global provider of positioning and wireless communication technologies and services in the automotive, industrial, and consumer markets, to redesign its innovative configuration software, u-center. With the revamped u-center 2, businesses in the Internet of Things (IoT) field like car manufacturers, logistics and appliance manufacturers can better evaluate the performance of their products.

Just a few years ago, satellite-based positioning, high precision tracking, and wireless connectivity to devices and to the cloud were, by and large, reserved for high-value use cases. Fast forward to today, and IoT technology is enabling products, services, and solutions we use every day.

Nitor joined u-blox as a technology partner at the beginning of 2020 to help the company grow its web technology knowledge using agile methods. Concretely, the collaboration enabled the redesign and continuous development of the u-center 2, a software that u-blox customers use to configure and evaluate their hardware.

Photos and video: u-blox

The impact

The revamped u-center 2 makes it easier for the customers to set up and configure their products as well as keep up to date with the latest software release. The potential to lift the performance of consumer devices to new heights is brought to more and more customers as the onboarding to IoT technology is made easier. The strong focus on user experience makes working with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology even more intuitive, and fun!

Beyond customers, u-center 2 offers other GNSS professionals, researchers, students, and members of the maker community a way to make sense of complex GNSS signals.

u-center 2 was redesigned from scratch to offer improved overall performance and added new features. With the collaboration between Nitor and u-blox, the development team learned new web technologies and adopted agile work methods.

I’m an avid cyclist so team-work and the positioning technology are near to my heart. With u-blox, we had a huge task of adopting a new technology and creating a new generation of software from scratch. Everyone had to push for us to succeed. For me, getting to act as a kind of domestique for our development team has been a truly inspiring experience.

- Jan Nyholm, Developer, Nitor

Positioning technology built with Swiss engineering quality

u-blox, headquartered in Switzerland, has a long experience in developing innovative products. The fabless chip company develops positioning and wireless communication technologies and services that connect cars, homes, industries, and society at large. Their smart and reliable solutions, services and products let people, vehicles, and machines determine their precise position and communicate wirelessly over cellular and short-range networks.

Back in 1997, u-blox produced the smallest GPS receiver module. This milestone in the company’s history immediately achieved commercial success – the Swiss toll system for trucks was equipped with the technology provided by u-blox.

u-blox is actively pursuing new ways to innovate in the field. In addition to building leading hardware components and value-added services, they are finding creative ways to streamline the development and testing of end-devices that use their products.

A case in point: u-center 2, a software tool that makes it easy to configure positioning solutions for specific use cases – allowing their customers to design even more cutting-edge IoT products such as wearables that require an extra-long battery life.

A faster development cycle with web technologies

u-blox's u-center is a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) evaluation and configuration software. The new u-center 2 is an Electron based desktop application built on modern web technologies. Electron is an open-source framework that allows for the development of desktop GUI applications using web technologies. Widely used and well documented web technologies were selected to ensure a faster development cycle and a modern and robust architecture.

u-center 2 is a multiplatform solution, adapting to customers preferences. The software supports product evaluation with a personalised, flexible user interface to observe and configure the behaviour of the connected u-blox GNSS receivers.

The quick product configuration allows users to define the GNSS product for key use cases such as wearable devices, vehicle or asset tracking. Saving, restoring, or sharing configurations between different products and users is easier than ever.

Customers are provided with frequent updates to ensure the software always has the latest functionalities and pre-defined configurations, and to add support for the most recent firmware of u-blox GNSS receivers. The user can install the updates with a single click.

The development team follows a multistage development environment that includes development, release candidate and the production environment. To ensure high code quality, before a new version is released to customers, the code goes through rigorous testing by the development team and selected developer champions. The code coverage is kept above 80% and the team is dedicated to automating as many integration tests as possible. The development pipeline makes sure that the unit and automated tests run on every line of code that is added to u-center 2.

Easy user interface enables a quick start

One of the priorities in updating the product was to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. u-center 2 is built on the previous generation, which makes adopting the new version easier. However, it has a distinctly more modern user interface and the ambitious goal to deliver better solutions to customers' problems.

The overall goal of the redesign is to onboard new customers in a hassle-free manner. The quick product configuration makes it easy to get started. Even in a complex domain of positioning, we want to avoid reading the manual!

A large customer base comes with many needs: the user interface is iteratively improved based on their feedback. With the built-in feedback, feature customers are able to communicate their needs directly. Valuable comments are also gathered from u-blox’s internal research and development department as well as developer champions who continually test the product. By improved and shortened feedback loops, u-blox development teams can prioritise their work and make decisions based on feedback and facts instead of assumptions, which in the end leads to higher customer satisfaction.

Asking questions leads to the right path

Overall, adopting new technology is always a complex matter. While web technologies allow for a faster development cycle, there were benefits in keeping with the old stack as well. The pros and cons of the transition were weighed carefully and web technologies were selected after a successful proof-of-concept and a motivated team eager to try a new challenge.

The development team had to learn high-level abstraction coding in a relatively short amount of time. Moving from a C++ and MFC to Typescript was a big step that proved to be successful thanks to good team dynamics and agile practices that foster learning and discovery.

We have a great team environment where we can be honest and supportive with each other. We work towards the same goal and the way we get there is by helping each other.

- Kornel Kovacs, Scrum master, u-blox