About Hydrema
Danish based Hydrema is a leading producer of advanced dirt moval equiptment and specialised defense solutions. Since being founded in 1959, the company has developed an impressive line of innovative machines for the changing needs of the construction and defense industries.
The product line for construction work includes dump trucks, backhoe loaders, wheeled excavators, and rail equipment, and the daughter company Hydrema Defense has perfected a mine clearing vehicle for military purposes.
With production facilities in Denmark and Germany and a comprehensive sales and service network across Europe, North America, and other regions, Hydrema has established itself as a global player in the construction and defense sectors.
The premise
When they approached us, Hydrema had already been working on an update for their embedded screens with German based WTW Electronics, a hardware and development company, for some time. While WTW had produced a substantial amount of code for the embedded control system, Hydrema had come to the decision that they needed more resources to reach their goal. They subsequently asked us to provide initially one and soon after two more developers for their project.
Our first developer was asked to go through all of the code WTW had already written to understand their way of coding. Furthermore, he and our second developer was tasked to use his expertise to make a report with recommendations on how to improve the process moving forward.
Machines with embedded screens
All of Hydrema’s machines are highly dependent on their embedded systems being flexible, reliable and secure. They wanted to improve these systems by splitting functions between the CCM and a tablet, to allow more functions to be accessible from the tablet instead of only through the CCM to increase productivity. Specifically key data like speedometer and critical indicators needed to be available on the tablet.
In addition, when the machines are constructed they are tailored to the customer’s specific needs, and the embedded system therefore should be easily tailored to these needs.
Our goal was reducing the complexity of the code to make work easy for the Hydrema developers. I'm quite happy with the end result, the HY5 framework, and I have had so much fun making it together with the great people of Hydrema and WTW!
HY5
After considering WTW’s code, our developer suggested creating a framework called HY5 to make everything much more flexible and less code-heavy.
HY5 reduces code complexity by 90% and integrates seamlessly with both CCMs and tablets, providing a flexible user interface for real-time data display. HY5 also optimizes CANbus communication for better performance and reliability. Built with modern development practices, HY5 is designed to be easily maintainable and adaptable to future needs, ensuring that Hydrema’s machines remain efficient and user-friendly.
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The Project
Throughout the project, we maintained close communication with both Hydrema and WTW to ensure that the framework met all operational needs and integrated smoothly with existing hardware. By adopting modern development tools and practices, including the transition to GitHub for version control and implementing CI/CD pipelines, we were able to accelerate the development process and improve overall code quality. The project has been a great success, resulting in a more efficient, flexible, and reliable software solution that positions Hydrema for future growth and innovation.
This project heavily relied on the expertise of our developers. We were tasked to write a report with suggestions on improvement; teach the Hydrema team best practice in GitHub; set them up properly in various systems; update their old methods to include new and improved systems; and in general helped them become experts in the system.
Succeeding these tasks has been the core reason for the overall success of the project.
I have been especially impressed with the project management from Hydrema, which is largely the reason why it has been so pleasant to work with both the Hydrema and the WTW teams. The project leader is great at keeping focus, and giving us the time and space while still maintaining daily meetings to make us feel connected without micro-management.
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