While I worked at Tigercat, I was on the telematics team. This team focuses on the designing and implementation of real-time data and machine diagnostics for their customers. We create the software that allows the customers to monitor their machines onsite using a wifi hotspot, and offsite by collecting their data through satellite. These software programs are called LogOn and RemoteLog, respectively. I helped manage the database, the gathering and displaying of data on the front end, and also participated in coding the embedded software on the machines.
While I was on the telematics team, a large number of my assignments were involved with their internal software, TEDS. This software is a more detailed and in-depth version of RemoteLog that the employees use to monitor and maintain the telematics system. Most of my work involved parsing the data into more human readable versions and adding more types of data to view in the program.
I also worked with the embedded software, creating reports out of the data on the machines and adding more types of satellite messages that would be viewable in TEDS and RemoteLog.
During my two terms at Tigercat, I completed a variety of projects. As stated previously, I worked with embedded software, the telematics database, and their internal software for monitoring and maintaining telematics (TEDS). There were 4 large projects that I completed during this coop that all helped me work on my skills and illustrate what I learned at school.
The first project was a data export utility. It would take the data stored on a machine export it to CSV or XML formats in excel. To accomplish this, I had to make my own XML generator and XML style generator. To do this, I had to make the classes very general so they could possibly be used in other projects. It would also greatly assist in their maintainability. I also ran into a problem that involved the front end of this project, so I worked closely with the web developer to come to a solution that we could both work with. From this project I learned a lot about maintainability and working with others. I got to be creative and use my own ideas for this XML generator and the design of the reports. I demonstrated my problem solving skills and object oriented programming skills that I learned at university.
The second project I worked on was a log viewer in TEDS. Tigercat wanted a way to easily view the logs from every machine, so I made a UI to select a specific log from a chosen machine and a popup to view that log. The logs were formatted differently depending on when they were created, as newer logs have updated algorithms and different logging classes. Therefore I had to make a general function that was able to parse all the log formats. I also added a keyword search option with the choice to search case sensitive or not. An option to refine the results by the log level was also created. This level refinement was able to work alongside the keyword search.
The third project I worked on was also with TEDS. This project tested my ability to apply the object oriented programming concept of encapsulation. To complete my task I had to introduce another type of excel graph to the program – one with two y axes. This involved more information to pass into the functions and more logic needed to create the graph. I therefore had to expand upon our helper class. I reworked it so that the functions could handle one y axis as well as an option to include the second y axis data. This made it clear and concise and didn’t involve any modifying of the logic for the single y axes graphs.
