ENES 2013 expo 🖥️

About the project

I was hired to finish a diorama-like interactive exhibition stand for the ENES expo.

When I joined the project, the layout for the diorama was complete, and the plastic mold was almost ready. My task was to bring diorama to life with electronics, so it could be controlled with tablet computers and light switches. Specifically, my employer trusted me with these tasks:

1. Pick equipment (computers, tablets, routers) before the mold is ready
2. Help allocate proper budget for the electronics
3. Assemble and connect all the equipment together when the plastic mold is installed on the exhibition stand
4. Develop client and server software to make components communicate with each other
5. Install my software and make sure the whole system works

Exhibition Stand Structure

The exhibition stand was essentially a plastic diorama with computers and LEDs. The model had a few buildings:

1. Office building
2. Power Station
3. Cottage

There were also two tablets disguised as buildings. One tablet controls Batteries of Static Capacitors (BSC), another one controls taps of On-Load Tap Changers (OLTC) of substation power transformers. Together, all the buildings on the interactive stand comprise a small model of electric power system. The user can influence the power system’s regime via tablet computers.

Beneath the model there is a desktop computer. The desktop computer and the tablets form a local network. The desktop acts as a server. Both tablets act as clients that send control commands to the server. By using controls on the tablets, the user either changes the tap of OLTC or state of BSC. The server receives commands from the clients, calculates power system regime, and presents the results on the big screen.

All software was written in C++ in a platform-agnostic way, allowing me to build it for any target platform in case I had to replace any of the machines. I developed the whole solution on my Linux machine and then built executables for Windows, which I thoroughly tested and then deployed to the target machines.