Whitelabelling a product

Background & brief

AirTurn wanted to resell their core technology as an OEM product to third parties, so needed to make the hardware easily configurable by employees and work in their Apps alongside their own products. In addition, AirTurn wanted users of their own products to be able to share device configuration profiles with each other.

Our Approach

We worked collaboratively with the team at AirTurn to understand the requirements for whitelabelling and configuration sharing, and then created wireframes which demonstrated how this would work in practice. These wireframes were discussed and developed further until they met all requirements and detailed fully how the system would work, including all edge and error cases. NRB Tech then developed the system, deployed firmware and App updates, and delivered documentation for using it to staff.

The solution

As AirTurn’s products were already configurable in the App, we decided this would be the best way to create device configuration profiles. AirTurn staff or even the OEM client themselves can configure an AirTurn device as they want the OEM product to be configured, and then export that configuration as a profile which can be used to configure the OEM devices.

The configuration profiles are stored in a human-readable JSON format, so that manual modification or addition can be made. These profiles can be exported and imported as files, but are also stored on AirTurn’s web server for OEM devices. The OEM devices are configured with an identifier, which the App uses to fetch the relevant configuration profile from the server. This configuration profile is used as the device defaults.

The solution was implemented in the shared C library developed as part of the Firmware Redevelopment project, so much of the code was written only once for all platforms, reducing development time.