Brick streamlines inspections on a budget

Nobody enjoys doing inspections, but they’re a fact of life across many different industries. If you rent out moving trucks, for example, you need to do inspections before and after each rental, so you know if a customer damages something that needs to be addressed. But the logistics of those inspections are tricky and often expensive. That’s why Alejandro Vazquez developed “Brick.”

Brick is an open-source embedded device designed specifically for performing and logging inspections. It is a handheld and compact unit that inspectors can carry in a glovebox, wear on a belt, or stuff in a pocket. When it is time for an inspection, they can use Brick to snap relevant photos according to a predefined routine, flag anomalies, and upload inspection reports.

Most importantly, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to build a Brick and it won’t require any proprietary (read: expensive) systems or software.

That’s possible because Brick relies on accessible off-the-shelf hardware. That includes an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board and GIGA Display Shield, an ArduCam Mini, an RFID reader, a real-time clock module with battery backup, and a NiMH-based rechargeable battery.

Vazquez built the interface GUI on LVGL and took advantage of available libraries when possible, but the functionality is custom. It is also secure, thanks to HTTPS communication, which could be critical for some businesses. 

On top of the Brick device itself, Vazquez even created a cloud backend and a web interface to access that. After building one or more Brick devices, a business could deploy the rest of the system in an afternoon — all without purchasing licenses or subscriptions.