Every day, HP ships large volumes of products that range from commercial printers, to personal computers. Occasionally, their products become damaged or unusable in transit. Ultimately, this costs the company valuable resources and impacts their relationship with clients and customers. Typically, it is not cost effective for HP to replace damaged goods and electronics during product shipment. Building, replacing, and shipping wastes precious materials and contributes to the world’s growing carbon footprint. The SAL device was developed to pinpoint where packages are being damaged, allowing HP to make logistical shipping changes and reduce excessive product waste in the future.
The SAL design project is comprised of a small hardware device that can be placed and shipped within various sized packages containing assorted goods. The device is responsible for aggregating and storing environmental data received from sensors connected; this information can be transferred from the device and uploaded to a web interface where a graphical representation of the data can be viewed by the employees at HP.
We have developed a web application that intakes the sensor data logged from the device and packages in transit, and uploads the recordings to a database. Registered users are allowed to view details on each "trip" that the device has made. The application displays thousands of sensor data readings for each individual sensor on the device, for each trip it made, including package temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, impact, and orientation. A user may also view the full transit path that the device made throughout its journey. Users have the option of analyzing the data based on user defined standard deviations.
