[ Case study ]Electricity transmission

    Grid Infrastructure · Pylon Survey Platform

    An offline field app, a 2D and 3D pylon viewer and generated fabrication documents, replacing an ageing survey tool for a team that assesses and maintains overhead-line pylons.

    • Offline field app
    • 2D + 3D pylon viewer

    A survey tool that could not show the tower

    The problem

    The client assesses the condition of overhead-line pylons on a national transmission network and plans their repair. Surveyors used an old tablet app that had no picture of the tower, so photos were matched to individual steel bars by timestamp, which left photos paired with the wrong bar or with none. Fabrication documents for replacement parts were then produced by hand, and a single pylon could take up to two weeks from survey to finished paperwork.

    Four slow steps, one platform

    What we solved

    Photos tied to the right bar

    Surveyors tap the bar on a drawing of the tower and attach the photo to it, so pairing no longer depends on timestamps.

    Fabrication documents generated

    The material list, bolt list, single line diagram and fabrication pack are produced from the survey data instead of by hand.

    Part details captured once

    Replacement-part details are recorded against the bar in the field and carried through to the documents, with no retyping.

    Progress at a glance

    Project managers follow survey progress on a dashboard, and every change is kept in an audit log that cannot be edited.

    The platform: survey review, pylon viewer and documents

    The offline field app

    What changed for the team

    Results
    • 01

      Surveyors work from a drawing of the actual tower, on or offline, and every photo is linked to the bar it shows.

    • 02

      Bars are colour-coded by condition, so the state of a pylon is clear in 2D or in a 3D model you can fly around.

    • 03

      Fabrication documents come straight from the survey data.

    • 04

      Admins, project managers and designers work in one portal, alongside the field app.

    How it was built

    Behind the build

    Web portal and field app on one backend

    A React web portal on Vercel and an Expo / React Native field app share one Supabase backend with Postgres row-level security, authentication, storage and Edge Functions. The field app keeps working offline on SQLite and syncs when back in signal.

    A 2D and 3D pylon viewer

    Tower designs are imported from DXF and drawn as a 2D face and plan view and a 3D model in three.js. The same drawing model powers a touch-friendly 2D view on mobile, built with React Native Skia.

    Documents and audit built in

    The platform generates the material list, bolt list, single line diagram and fabrication pack, and records every change in an immutable audit log. The code lives in one TypeScript monorepo managed with Turborepo.

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