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Why I Love CallBox: A Developer’s Perspective
October 17, 2024
By Claire Lundy | Software Engineer | Have you ever found yourself stuck troubleshooting device setup when you could be working on something more exciting?\In my role as a mobile and cloud developer at a consultancy specializing in IoT, I work on a wide variety of projects. However, many IoT solutions share common features, such as device provisioning, Over-the-Air (OTA) firmware updates, command and control, and data analytics. While essential, implementing these features can be […]
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How to Set Up a Smart Home: A Beginner’s Guide From IoT Experts
July 10, 2024
By Claire Lundy | Software Engineer | If you’ve ever been intrigued by the idea of transforming your living space into a smart haven but felt daunted by the prospect, you’re in the right place. This guide, crafted with insights from IoT experts, will walk you through setting up your smart home, demystifying the process, and illustrating how it can lead to savings and an enriched lifestyle. Understanding IoT: The Backbone of Smart Homes Before […]
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A HIL to Die On
July 22, 2024
By Garrett Sutton | Software Engineer – Embedded | HIL, or Hardware in the Loop, is a technique for testing an embedded system during the Continuous Integration process. By adding HIL to your CI/CD pipeline, you can automate tests using the exact same hardware you are running in the field! Here at SpinDance, we run a comprehensive set of unit tests and manual system tests on our embedded repositories. These manual system tests can be […]
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Choosing the Right Espressif Part for Your IoT Product
July 11, 2024
By Rocky Sherriff | Principal Software Engineer So you’re starting a new IoT project and you have some freedom to choose your hardware. That’s both thrilling and terrifying – there are a lot of options out there! One good place to start for many IoT products might be the Espressif product line. They offer a wide range of radios and processors along with a mature software framework that is largely portable across their line. That […]
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Understanding the Differences Between SpinDance Product Owners and Client Product Owners
July 1, 2024
By Colleen Laskowski | Director of Delivery | In the dynamic world of software development, the role of the Product Owner (PO) is crucial for guiding a product from concept to market. However, the responsibilities and focus areas of Product Owners can vary significantly depending on whether they are consulting for clients within their software projects like we do at SpinDance or fulfilling the role of the Product Owner at the organization itself. In this […]
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The Value of Unit Tests in Mobile Development
June 24, 2024
By Robert Hartman | Principal Software Engineer Having a mobile app codebase that is heavily unit-tested is such a benefit: as a professional software developer, if you’re not writing copious unit tests, you’re missing out. Writing tests can be frustrating, and they can and do add a lot of extra work, but writing tests will make your code better and make you a better developer. It’s just hard to see that […]
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Streamlining Your Flutter Deployment Process with Firebase App Distribution Using Fastlane: Part 1
October 15, 2024
By James Preston | Senior Software Engineer & Engineering Manager For mobile developers working with Flutter, deploying apps to multiple platforms can quickly become a repetitive and time-consuming task. By leveraging tools like Fastlane and Firebase App Distribution, you can automate these processes, allowing you to focus on writing high-quality code and other important aspects of development. In this guide, we’ll cover how to set up Fastlane with Flutter […]
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Developing on Windows with WSL: A Guide to Streamlining Cross-Platform Development
June 14, 2024
By James Preston | Senior Software Engineer & Engineering Manager I have a Windows desktop machine as well as a Mac book provided by my company. The Mac is great to carry with me, it’s lightweight and decently powerful. However, when it comes to developing at home I like to use my Windows machine with its multiple monitors and extra horsepower. The problem, of course, has always been the slight differences in using the two […]
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Agile, Scrum, BINGO!
June 3, 2024
By Kim Burmeister|CEO On a recent sales call, I was speaking with the client and I mentioned that we use Scrum, an Agile framework for our software development methodology. She quickly exclaimed, “There it is! Agile is the center square on my Bingo card. I knew you were going to say that word today.” A bit confused, I asked why she had this reaction. On a previous project, another vendor had sold Agile and Scrum […]
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Why Jupyter Notebooks Are My Favorite OpenCV Playground
May 22, 2024
By Ben Jacques|Director of Engineering Introduction OpenCV (https://opencv.org/) is my GOTO framework for image processing these days. I spent many years working in a proprietary framework, which was great. However, for most of the projects I work on now, it doesn’t make sense to pay high licensing fees when there is a good open source alternative. OpenCV is versatile. It’s robust. It’s well-documented. It’s also sometimes pretty hard to work with when you are experimenting. […]