Building a mobile app as an HMI for the Cranio ecosystem | Perth Mobile App Developers Meetup

00:00 Introduction
00:26 The Cranio story
02:55 Difficulties of IoT
05:15 Key components of the system
06:55 The app & the backend
08:50 Achieving real time data flow
11:01 Building a Bluetooth sync library
13:10 Visualisation tool for high-speed data monitoring
15:10 Why didn’t we use off-the-shelf solutions?
16:51 What sets Cranio apart?
18:15 A developer’s approach
19:42 Can you run this on an Arduino?
20:46 Where does the graphing code run now?
22:00 How will you achieve this goal?
23:03 What are the most popular sensors used with Cranio?
24:31 Is the data storage and messaging well defined enough?
27:35 Have you faced issues with data duplication?

You can’t just throw real-time data at an app and expect it to work.

At the last Perth Mobile App Developers Meetup, our very own Ayrton Sue and Ravinder Bhandari shared the challenges of handling high-speed data in mobile apps, particularly for data logging and control solutions, like our Cranio ecosystem.

When real-time IoT data is streaming in at 20Hz or more, the usual solutions start to fall apart. JSON quickly becomes a bottleneck, off-the-shelf charting libraries struggle to keep up, and UI updates can lag behind, making the whole experience unusable.

To solve this, Ravinder and the team had to rethink how data flows from sensor to screen. Ravinder and the team moved to Protobuf for faster serialization, built a unified communication layer that works across Android, iOS, and web, and developed a custom charting solution that maintains smooth performance even at high data rates.

They also designed a state machine modelling system that allows developers to configure complex device interactions without touching firmware or low-level code.

These aren’t just IoT challenges, they’re the same issues faced by anyone working with high-frequency updates in mobile apps. Whether it’s real-time analytics, live telemetry, or anything that demands low latency and high reliability, getting the architecture right from the start makes all the difference.

The next Perth Mobile App Developers Meetup is happening on Wednesday, 26th February 2025, at Adapptor. If you’re into networking and love a good discussion, come along!

More details on the Meetup webpage, link in our bio.