NB: This project was completed by the director of Widget 5 before Widget 5 was formed.
CabCo approached our client Technman Electronics Ltd with an innovative new idea - child entertainment in a shopping trolley like form. Widget 5 became involved after an early prototype and developed several iterations of product to meet the evolving needs of our customer.
To bring this product to market would require a significant amount of technical expertise. Technman provided electrical specifications and best practice while Widget 5 Limited provided usability advice with software know-how.
Initial models featured one unit, the Kart, each one containing a coin slot to accept payment and music and songs for the children. It soon became apparent that having a coin box in each kart both made them heavier and made collecting cash from stores difficult. In addition, it was hard to decide when to visit stores to change batteries and collect cash with no way of discovering how much had been collected.
After initial success in New Zealand, Cabco signed a contract with Wal-Mart to roll out several thousand Karts across many stores in the US. A new type of solution was required, one that would scale well overseas. The stand unit was introduced, collecting cash from customers and allowing them to choose which Kart to hire. Each stand maintains a radio link with the Karts throughout the store, allowing it to hire karts, track their usage and upgrade their firmware remotely.
Because each stand unit is in radio contact with the Karts, it is able to download data from them over time and provides summaries of this data to operators on site. Harvest Electronics was then able to augment this with a GPRS based solution that uploads log information from each stand unit and provides analysis on the web. This solution is sophisticated enough to send text messages to service operators when a store needs attention, due to low batteries, full note safes or other error conditions.