Snow Scope App

Design and cross platform Flutter development of a Bluetooth application for a connected device

As a cofounder of Propagation Labs, we developed a connected instrument for measuring snow. In addition to the hardware development, I was responsible for creating the mobile and web apps to connect to the hardware, and view, store, manipulate, and share data coming from the hardware.

Although I am a mechanical design engineer by training, I have dabbled in software for a while, and decided that learning the Flutter cross platform development environment would be the most efficient way to develop apps for iOS, Android, and Web with the same codebase.

It has been a long process to learn and develop these applications, but I’m pretty proud of the outcome, and the app has been live on all platforms for about three years now, allowing thousands of snow and avalanche professionals to collect, analyze, and share snowpack data in an efficient manner.

Challenges faced:

• Simplifying and optimizing UI design for complex functionality and custom data display and manipulation

• Offline functionality and syncing to firebase backend

• Robust background bluetooth functionality across device types, designing and working with custom BLE API

• Implementing a robust over the air firmware updater

• collaborating with other snow professionals and organizations to share and integrate our data into external systems (building out custom API)

• Building validation tools for LLM voice to structured data functionality

Some of the tech and tools learned and utilized:

• Flutter/Dart cross platform development for iOS, Android, and Web

• Firebase backend

• Invision Studio for UI design mockups

• Picovoice offline audio commands and voice processing

• OpenAI APIs for auto conversion of audio to structured snowpit data

• Custom Bluetooth Protocol Development