BladeEdge, an EdgeData Company
A software portal that transforms raw data from blade-condition assessments and wind farm management systems into actionable intelligence.
Tech Stack and Tools
About the Problem
After graduating from the Iowa Startup Accelerator, EdgeData had a business and a product, BladeEdge that they use to save wind farms millions of dollars in maintenance costs by providing quick and easy turbine inspections. Using commercially available drones and custom navigation logic, they are able to cut the time of a turbine inspection down from hours to minutes. As they scaled up, they began to incur more infrastructure costs, and also were looking to automate some of the more time-intensive parts of their inspection process. This is when they got in touch with NewBoCo Studios to help streamline their AWS infrastructure.
About the Solution
We began our process with cost reduction. Each inspection contained hundreds of images used to pinpoint the location and severity of damage. Over time, these images added up, so we were tasked with finding a more efficient method of storing them in AWS. After careful planning and tweaking the code to look elsewhere, we carefully switched the several terabytes of image files to their new home. Without impacting performance of the application, we were able to slash the storage costs by 83%.
Once we had completed the storage transition, we moved on to save time during the image ingestion process. For each inspection the drone's images get processed then needed to be downloaded from S3 only to be uploaded again with manual steps required to properly structure the inspection data in the database. Our next step was to replace this manual work with a serverless function to copy the processed images over to the new application storage. For this we developed a function that was able to determine when the file processing was complete, then automatically configured the inspection in the database and appropriately attached the images from the flight. This saved hours of manual work over the course of inspecting a wind farm, allowing BladeEdge to expand their offering and inspect more turbines.
