2021 — Full Stack Development

Lab Equipment Portal

Real-time equipment tracking with QR check-out, connecting a live status board to a physical lab. The project that pivoted my career from hardware to software.

The brief

I ran the product-development lab at Pensar Development, a consultancy where engineering teams shared a finite pool of equipment: test gear, tools, benches. There was no formal tracking. In practice, finding an oscilloscope meant posting in a Teams group and hoping whoever had it read the message. I was the person that system failed on, because managing the equipment was my job.

Asana before code

Before writing any software I bent an existing tool into shape: an Asana board with a task per equipment item, columns for status, borrowers as assignees, calibration documents attached to each task. It worked, and that was the point. The workaround proved what a real system needed: live status per item, a clear owner, and the paperwork attached to the thing itself.

It also showed where a workaround tops out. The board only agreed with the room if everyone did their Asana chores. The fix had to make updating the record part of physically taking the equipment.

QR codes, one source of truth

So in 2021 I built the portal: every piece of equipment became a record with a live status, free or in use, and got a QR code on the device itself. Scanning it checks the item out or shows its status. The board on screen and the shelf in the lab describe the same reality because updating the record is part of picking the thing up.

A proper reservation system for future bookings stayed on the roadmap and never got built. The core loop, scan, take, return, was the product.

Every layer at once

This was my first end-to-end full-stack product. My background to that point was electronics, prototyping labs, test fixtures, and factory floors. I chose React, Node.js, and GraphQL partly because I wanted to learn them, which meant every layer was new at once: component state, API design, the database, deployment.

The portal shipped to the whole engineering team, colleagues who would walk over to my desk when something broke. That compressed the feedback loop to hours, and there was no hiding behind a demo.

The hinge

The portal did its job, but its real output was a career decision. Building it, I noticed the part I could not put down was not the plumbing. It was designing how people interact with a system: what the board shows, what checking something out feels like, where the interface and the physical room have to agree.

I left hardware, did a Master’s in Interaction Design in Barcelona, and became a design engineer. Every AI tool I have built since traces back to this internal tool for a room full of test equipment. It is the hinge of the whole portfolio.