The past few weeks have been busy at work. We were asked to interface one our pumps with SAP so we could download it's event log into the SAP Quality System at the end of the assembly and testing of the pump.
After a certain amount of fiddling about, I got the OBEX interface to work and parsed out of the XML log the data we wanted. It then turned out that we had two other interfaces in the same physical pump to deal with at the same time that we didn't initially know about - one device and three software systems. Both the new ones are HTTP rather than OBEX transfers, one uses the same XML log files as the OBEX interface the other uses a less structured free text solution.
It's all been done in a single semi-modular Perl CGI application on a Windows PC, and then the SAP system interrogates the PC via a HTTP call. It's a bit of a string and sticky tape solution but it does work. For good measure I also merged in an existing and different interface to a different medical pump so that the SAP side could be streamlined down to just one set of configuration values.
It's been really challenging and fun to do, and when we tried it for the first time on a test PC everything worked first time - even the deployment documentation is pretty good. Another good win for Perl.
