Delivering a Business Idea to Production: Developing an IoT-Enabled Smart Trail Camera

The client is a leader in the Outdoors, Shooting Sports, and Sporting Goods industry that strives to deliver innovative and technical solutions for their customers.

Challenge

The client wanted to develop a new digital product to revolutionize the outdoor sports industry. They wanted to build a digital action camera that hunters and trackers could connect to via a mobile application. The client was looking for a partner who could deliver this innovative service by the hunting season and start collecting market feedback.

Solution

The Orion team was brought in for our digital product engineering expertise to work to build this camera and software combination. Our team began with the discovery phase, clearly defining use cases, product KPIs, and design for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). 

Two of the major challenges with IoT-enabled devices is maintaining a proper connection to the internet and building an intuitive and user experience. 

Orion SMEs used decades of experience in designing IoT solutions to define the entire system architecture and product technology roadmap and select the most suitable communication protocols and commercial and open-source software components to accelerate the development with the industry-proven building blocks. They were able to ensure the solution could handle several key tasks including data collection, asset management, cloud resource consumption, and more.

While that development was going on, our Business Analysts and UX Designers worked closely with the client to develop functional and non-functional product requirements and define the unique user experience. 

The developed system delivers various hunt planning features such as: 

• Camera location via satellite map 
• Image & Data sharing capability  
• Weather and moon phase logging for improved hunt forecasting 
• Using the power of AI/ML for image recognition to target specific species 
• Advanced photo sorting, and more 

During the next phases, the Orion team significantly enhanced the solution with new functionality, and added new applications on top of the proven platform, and continued to provide end-to-end software engineering services: User Experience, Solution Design, Development, QA, DevOps, and Customer Support. 

Impact

The Orion team met the client’s intended deadline for the hunting season. The new camera along with the connective iOS and Android applications provides the client’s customers with a smart hunting experience: smart cameras deployed over the forest help trace animals, automatically recognize species, check the weather forecast, and much else to have the most entertaining adventure.