This extensive web-application tracks inventory of a many acre synchrotron facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory's National Synchrotron Light Source II. The system enables physicists to troubleshoot problem equipment quickly by connecting inventory properties, logs, documents and maintenance records. We integrated a very complicated legacy MySQL database with Django and other third party apps. Unique constraints required us to write most of the site's database queries in raw SQL rather than using Django's native ORM.
Our work included the inventory, maintenance and experimental workflow scheduling, logging, UX and UI sections. We used HighCharts to graph properties. The website integrated with iPad-based barcode scanning software that we built allowing for easy lookup, verification and troubleshooting of inventory items. As part of the final phase of work we have put the entire system in Docker containers to enable easy trialling by interested parties. This two-year project was broken into four contracts totaling over 1000 hours. The site is behind a firewall, but the code is public.
