Umbrella Renting Service.

Overview.

The aim of this project was to develop an Umbrella renting system. Our client was London’s first umbrella sharing system. We developed a prototype which allowed customers to rent and return umbrellas from a machine using contactless payment, card, or mobile application.

Challenges.

One of the main challenges was to make the hardware affordable to develop, connected, and easy to use by developing both the hardware and control system itself in parallel.

Project details.

By utilizing an ARM as the core of the system, a set of sensors and actuators in the device can track each umbrella in order to charge users according to their usage. The system includes a heating element to dry the umbrellas once returned to the device. One of the key factors is that the system was designed to be scalable and reliable in order for the umbrellas to be returned to any machine from the network.