Self-parking kiosks make managing carparks easier and better than the usual parking facility. The main advantage of parking kiosks for business owners is their ability to make the customer’s parking experience better. Long parking queues are eliminated, and payments are always secured. Additionally, modern self-parking kiosks like Aria are made interactive to address customer needs better.
Here’s everything you need to know about this amazing technology.
Offers Secured Way of Paying:
Self-parking kiosk systems vary from one manufacturer to another, but one thing remains the same—their level of security. These kiosks are made to provide secure payment solutions not just for the customers but for the business who owns the machine.
Payments can be made through a mobile application, via credit card, or by scanning the barcode on the ticket. Because most people are now leaning towards a cashless economy, it only makes sense to offer cashless payment options.
Here’s how credit card payments are processed:
The customer selects the duration of stay.
The customer inserts or swipes the credit card into the machine.
The customer waits for the machine to dispense a parking ticket.
The customer collects the parking ticket and places it on their dashboard so attendants can easily spot them.
Customers who wish to cancel the transaction can do so by pressing cancel before the machine dispenses a parking ticket.
Here is how mobile payments are processed:
A customer selects the duration of stay and chooses a mobile payment option.
They wait for the machine to dispense the parking ticket.
They can scan the barcode on their ticket using their smartphone.
The barcode should direct the customer to the mobile application or to a website where they can pay for the parking fee or apply validations.
These steps may vary, but this is essentially how these payments are being processed.
Customer Service Ready:
A reliable self-parking kiosk should offer a system where businesses can manage parking customers. The system’s dashboard gives parking supervisors and attendants an overview of the parking traffic and how many tickets are dispensed. Moreover, the dashboard also generates reports when you need them.
Some self-parking kiosks have cameras and speakers installed into them so that attendants can quickly assist customers who encounter a problem. The system can also take a photo of the car for future references and security reasons.
Here are some other customer-service-related tasks you should be able to do on your dashboard:
Offer online reservations
Change parking rates
Open and close parking gates manually
Review transaction history
Customize data views
View other parking garages with self-parking kiosks
Gives You Important Data:
In this day and age, data is everything. When you have data, you have power over your business. You might be wondering as to what information a self-parking kiosk can provide. Data such as wait times, duration of stay, occupancy rate, and payment types can be gathered from these kiosks. These data can be correlated to customer behaviors.
For example, if you have a hotel business and have installed a kiosk in your parking garage, you can get the data as to when there is a high demand for customer parking. You can then use this historical data to create a more effective pricing strategy just like what you see with ride-sharing services who react based on the demand present.
Customizable:
These things aren’t just a large metal box hanging out in your parking garage. You can customize your kiosks so that it reflects your branding and shows your logo.
Having a customized kiosk will prevent confusion from your customers, especially if your parking facility is in a high-traffic location. Here are other things that you can customize:
Screen idle display – You can customize the idle display so that it uses your branding colors and shows your logo. This kind of customization helps increase brand awareness and reliability.
Advertisements – You can also place ads on the screen while the kiosk prints out the ticket. Customization like this helps you generate additional income.
Text and button sizes – Establishments who frequently cater to senior citizens or persons with disability will benefit significantly with this kind of customization. They can make the text sizes on the screen bigger and make the buttons easily understandable for their parking customers.
Conclusion:
Parking is part of the overall customer journey, and if your customers’ parking experience is poor, they may have a bad impression of your establishment already even before actually doing business with you. It’s time to take your business to the digital age and start employing self-parking kiosks. They don’t just make parking more comfortable. They also help elevate the customer experience.
I enjoy writing and I write quality guest posts on topics of my interest and passion. I have been doing this since my college days. My special interests are in health, fitness, food and following the latest trends in these areas. I am an editor at Content Rally.
If you have a business, you could be making use of a commercial boiler. A commercial boiler would often be classified as such if the unit has a power rating of 70kW and above, and if your boiler unit produces this much power, then it is already categorized as a commercial boiler. You should also know that your commercial boiler needs to be regularly serviced by a professional. With regular boiler servicing, you can be sure that your property will not have any disruptions due to boiler issues, and you will not be left with more expenses in the end. But there is also a proper way to have your boiler serviced. First of all, it needs to be done by someone who is aptly qualified, such as an engineer who has a Gas Safety card. You should check that they have the right qualifications and can do commercial boiler checks and inspections. But when you have your commercial boiler serviced, here's how a proper inspection should be done.
Step 1: a visual check:
The technician should check that the pipework of your boiler, as well as your flue and the actual boiler, are correctly installed, and they should do a visual check of both the external and internal components as well. The technician should also check for the right ventilation as well as do a visual inspection of the flame and check for any signs of leaks or corrosion. Since you are operating a commercial boiler, they should also check that it follows regulations for non-domestic property. These regulations include gas safety rules as well as building regulations, by-laws for water, and European and British standards as well.
Step 2: a check of components:
The engineer or technician should then remove the casing of the boiler and inspect each internal element or component. Some parts which need to be inspected by the engineer include the gas flow and pressure, the combustion and flue, the heat exchanger, the burner, the main injector, the electrical connections, the spark probe, the seals and fans, the electrodes, the condensate pipe and trap, and the safety components or devices. After this, the engineer should clean the boiler’s insides to remove any blockage or debris.
Step 3: the tests:
The engineer should then perform tests to check that the boiler is functioning correctly according to Gas Safety regulations for installation and use. If any issues are found (e.g. gas leaks, faults, and parts which are damaged), the engineer should make a note of this in the report.
Step 4: the report:
Once they have thoroughly inspected the boiler and all its components, the engineer should give you a report of their findings and the process and checks they made, as confirmed by an experienced commercial gas engineer in north London. If there is an issue, it should also be in the report, particularly if it involves replacement or repair. If your boiler violates any regulations pertaining to Gas Safety or building regulations, the engineer should include this in the report as well.
It is essential that you ask as many questions as you can and voice any of your concerns while the gas engineer is there. This is your chance to ask for guidance and advice as well – it is, after all, your business property, and by taking advantage of a full check and inspection, you are adequately protecting your assets too.
Read Also:
How To Become A Certified HVAC Technician In Canada
13 Ways To Maintain The Coolness Of Your Air Condition Unit
Transfer pumps are used to move liquids from one place to another. Various types are suited for different applications, fluids, and industry settings. Understanding the unique features and workings of the major transfer pump types can help you select the right one for your needs. This article explores centrifugal, rotary, reciprocating, metering, and diaphragm pumps, along with their typical uses. Read on for the insight!
Types Of Transfer Pumps
There are a variety of transfer pumps available for different applications at providers like KNF USA. The major types include centrifugal, rotary, reciprocating, metering, and diaphragm designs. Below are elaborate discussions on each of these.
Centrifugal Pumps
Centrifugal pumps are a versatile choice for transferring large volumes of low- to high-viscosity liquids efficiently. At the heart of these pumps is an impeller inside a casing that spins at high speeds to accelerate fluid outward from the center via centrifugal force. The kinetic energy imparted on the liquid creates flow through the discharge piping.
Unlike positive displacement pumps, centrifugal models provide non-pulsating flows that are perfect for services like boosting pressures across piping systems. The curved vanes of impellers can handle particulates without clogging, too. You get reliable service life even when pumping water containing suspended solids or abrasives.
While centrifugal pumps generate substantial heads or pressure rises by velocity change, adjusting impeller diameters and rotational speeds allows customizing performance for the liquid and throughput demands. These pumps can tackle everything from thin polyethylene glycols to highly viscous oils or process chemicals.
Common applications capitalizing on such adaptable pumping capabilities include:
Generating water pressures to replace gravity feed systems
Transferring diesel and lubricants in refueling operations
Moving liquid food ingredients between storage and processing vessels
Circulating hot oil to distribute heat at chemical plants
Supplying river water to filtration systems at portable plants
Whether thin or thick, corrosive or benign, centrifugal pumps represent a safe bet for continuously handling large volumes across pipelines with ease.
Rotary Pumps
Rotary pumps handle liquids through unique rotary displacement mechanisms like gears, lobes, vanes, screws, and cavities. This single shaft and bearing design not only minimizes maintenance but enables handling viscous products up to one million cPs. Such high viscosity capabilities prove invaluable when transferring adhesives, coatings, greases, tars, and heavy crude oils across food processing, chemical production, oil drilling, wastewater treatment, and paper manufacturing settings.
While providing pulse-free flow, rotary pumps allow bi-directional operation as well, either pumping or metering flow, depending on how system valves and controls are set up. This flexibility suits applications ranging from precision additive dosing to bulk transfers into tank trucks. By handling everything from solvents to sludge, you get optimal utility from just one rotary pump type.
Reciprocating Pumps
Oil patches, mines, boiler rooms, and chemical plants have relied on heavy-duty reciprocating pumps for ages to easily transfer viscous fluids. A motor-driven piston is thrust inside a cylinder to draw in suction liquid via balls check valves before discharging volumes out under high pressure—all in continuous cycles.
This positive displacement working principle is suitable for high-pressure injection duties. Plunger pumps configured for ultra-high pressures facilitate hydraulic fracturing operations across gas and oil wells to improve yields, for example. Boiler feed pumps also ensure precise metering of feedwater to maintain proper drum levels and steam output.
When handling toxic fluids like aircraft deicing agents that require containment, reciprocating pumps prevent leaks and offer explosion-proofing as well. You can count on this versatile pump style for mission-critical transfer and metering challenges.
Metering Pumps
Whether conveying ammonia, alcohol, or even fruit concentrates and medicines, metering pumps ensure accurate flow measurement and dispensing. Diaphragms pulsate or pistons stroke at controlled speeds to handle precise liquid volumes per cycle. Operating much like precision reciprocating pumps, metering units work continuously to inject additives, introduce treatment chemicals, or dose active ingredients at extremely narrow tolerances.
You gain optimized usage of expensive ingredients, prevent overdosing situations, cut loss from giveaways, and ensure product quality consistency thanks to such pinpoint flow control. Water treatment facilities, swimming pool operators, semiconductor fabs, and pharmaceutical producers rely extensively on metering pumps for regulated chemical handling day in and day out.
Read Also: 10 Benefits & Drawbacks Of Purchasing A Heat Pump
Diaphragm Pumps
Diaphragm pumps lend unique advantages for abrasive fluid handling by eliminating exposure of rotating shafts and vanes to the pumping liquid. Flexible attached membranes pulsate instead to facilitate flow. This makes diaphragm pumps ideal for slurries across mining, agriculture processing, wastewater treatment, paper mass forming, and food pureeing applications where solids quickly erode steel impellers.
Check valves ensure directional flow as the elastomer membranes alternatively draw suction and achieve discharge. You don't have to worry about leaks either when transferring aggressive solvents or corrosive chemicals, thanks to the isolation membranes provide between pump internals and casings exposed to liquids. Whether high-purity beverage ingredients or hazardous paint pigments, diaphragm pumps safeguard processed products and personnel.
Choosing The Best Type For Your Needs
With insight into the major transfer pump categories, you can zero in on options fitting your capacity, liquid properties, flow rates, pressure rise, and overall application demands. Centrifugal pumps take the lead for high flow conditions, while metering and diaphragm designs manage strict precision flow control. Evaluate operating environments as well when materials compatibility is critical. Discussing details with suppliers gives you professional guidance to match a pump successfully.
The wide world of transfer pumps holds something suitable for any liquid transfer duty. Do your homework on the fluid properties and application specs. Understanding pump operating principles also guides you to the ideal selection. With these insights, you pick the right pump to fulfill your liquid handling requirements.
Conclusion
The various types of transfer pumps each serve distinct applications depending on factors like liquid characteristics, flow rates, pressures, precision, and duty environments. You now have a helpful overview of the unique features, workings, and typical uses of centrifugal, rotary, reciprocating, metering, and diaphragm pumps. With these fundamentals, you can make informed decisions when selecting a transfer pump for your needs. Discussing specifics with suppliers adds insights to hone in on the best equipment.
Additional:
The Many Uses of Industrial Vacuum Ovens
Risks of Imbalanced Swimming Pool Chemistry
Car Wont Start After Getting Gas – How To Fix This Problem?
Swimming Pool Cleaning and Maintenance: Cheap Online Pool Supplies
Worldwide, there has been a sharp increase in the number of mobile application downloads. Organizations aim to increase user engagement for their applications by releasing new features every few weeks to gain a foothold in this market. This increases the pressure on testing organizations to publish thoroughly tested mobile applications to increase user engagement.
To accomplish this, they must have a testing process that not only delivers applications that are free of bugs and function well but also has more thorough coverage. Naturally, automated mobile testing is becoming necessary to satisfy these demands. Automation testing is advantageous for all applications, including web and mobile ones.
Appium is the most widely used automation tool for testing mobile applications out of the many available options. Appium is a free and open-source test automation tool that aids in automating mobile app testing to provide users with a high-quality application and a better user experience.
The use of Appium on LambdaTest for mobile testing will be covered in this article. Before getting there, let's quickly review what mobile testing is and why Appium is utilized for this purpose.
What Is Mobile Testing?
The use of smartphones and mobile technology is growing exponentially. People find it difficult to see their lives without them. Today, we use mobile devices for practically everything, from grocery shopping to viewing films. To survive in the competitive market, mobile app testing has become imperative. Mobile testing guarantees that the apps and smartphones are safe, reliable, and easy to use.
Several tests are conducted on mobile devices to evaluate an application's reliability, functionality, and usability. Mobile testing can be divided into testing of mobile applications and testing of mobile devices. Mobile device testing verifies and validates both the physical components and software aspects of a device to authenticate its quality. It evaluates aspects like the screen, apps, camera, etc. On the other side, mobile application testing is a procedure used to test applications that are being created for mobile devices. The primary goals are to test the apps' usability, stability, and functioning. It makes sure that the chosen application, in terms of connectivity, hardware, and software, is compatible with the chosen device.
For an app to survive in the market today, mobile application testing is essential. The application is also tested in numerous other areas, such as its performance, security, and UI, to provide the best quality for the end users
Types Of Mobile Apps
There are three primary categories of mobile applications:
Native mobile apps
Native applications are platform-specific. In other words, they were created for a particular platform or operating system. It may be a Windows SDK, Android SDK, or iOS SDK. They have the extra benefit of being faster and more dependable in terms of performance because they concentrate on a single OS, but they are expensive to maintain. Such programs include Skype, Google Maps, and Snapchat, for instance.
Mobile Web Applications
Only mobile browsers are compatible with mobile web applications. They are accessible through mobile web browsers like Chrome and Safari. They are created using web-based languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Additionally, it is inexpensive and does not need users to install or update it. These include websites like AliExpress, OLX, Flipkart, etc.
Hybrid Mobile Applications
Native and web-based mobile apps are combined to create hybrid mobile apps. They can operate through browsers but can also be installed on native application devices. These apps are easy to create and affordable, but they lack the speed and power of native apps. These include services like Instagram, Uber, Gmail, etc.
Now to test these apps many testers and developers leverage automation test tools like Appium. Let's quickly define what Appium is.
Appium
Appium is a free, open-source, cross-platform test automation tool that uses the common WebDriver library to automate test cases for web, native, and hybrid applications. It primarily focuses on testing mobile applications while utilizing the same API across several mobile operating systems, such as Android and iOS.
The most popular mobile testing tool, Appium, offers simplicity, flexibility, and cost-friendliness for delivering the best user experiences with the continuous delivery method. It is used for quick and reliable testing across numerous platforms and devices.
Numerous programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, C#, etc., are supported by Appium. This gives testers the freedom to create test scripts in any programming language they choose. With its many features, mobile testing with Appium has quickly become popular in the mobile application organization.
Why Use Appium
Appium continues to be the top option for mobile app testing, regardless of whether the application is native, hybrid, or mobile and operating on Android, iOS, or Windows. By providing scalability and flexibility, Appium significantly improves the effectiveness of testing for mobile apps. It stands out as the best possible choice for testing mobile applications due to its broad feature set. Let's examine a few of its attributes.
It allows for the flexibility to write test code in a variety of programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python, and C#, and it can automate any mobile application created in any of these languages.
Appium allows test automation scripts to run simultaneously on various Android or iOS sessions. This ensures scalability while accelerating the testing process.
It has a built-in UI Automator that enables thorough examination of mobile apps while producing thorough logs and reporting structures for a better understanding of test results and enhanced troubleshooting.
Appium offers the reuse of the same code for many device platforms, including iOS, Android, and Windows, which saves a significant amount of time and work.
It provides versatility in allowing users to select their testing environment and device by allowing testing of mobile applications on emulators, simulators, and real devices in the cloud.
It provides cross-platform compatibility, making it possible for the same tests to run on many platforms, expanding the coverage.
It provides real-time test monitoring that enables collaborators to see and share device interactions using the integrated collaborative screen-casting capability, thus strengthening the execution of tests.
Appium smoothly integrates with the TestNG testing framework, providing a greater number of capabilities.
Through test scripts, it gives QAs complete access to the databases and back-end APIs. This aids in evaluating errors that originate from databases or back-end APIs.
Why Use Lambdatest For Appium Tests?
As is already known, Appium enables the testing of mobile applications on emulators and simulators. However, keep in mind that emulators and simulators are completely insufficient for testing at the final stage. They are unable to duplicate several device features that are required to optimize the app for unfavorable events, such as low power, unstable network, IP geolocation, and many more.
Therefore, executing Appium tests on real device cloud is essential to provide conclusive, accurate results, make an app suited for working in actual user conditions, and ensure that the user experience is always at its best.
However, it is highly challenging and expensive to set up an internal device lab that must be regularly updated and maintained for both the newest and older versions. Therefore, using a cloud-based testing platform like LambdaTest is recommended because it makes thousands of real devices instantly accessible for testing.
Appium and LambdaTest, an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform, can work together seamlessly. As a result, testers can scale their existing testing across several platforms and develop, run, and analyze their test automation with Appium on LambdaTest's real device cloud. Additionally, QAs can use Appium on the LambadTest real device cloud to do manual and automated app testing.
LambdaTest enables testers to run Appium tests by offering online cloud-based access to more than 3000 real devices, browsers, and operating system combinations online. As a result, testers may meet deadlines more quickly and with less setup time.
The Appium automation testing on LambdaTest can assist with:
Simplify the entire CI/CD process, make it simple to write reliable Appium scripts, and minimize the complexity of test frameworks.
Support numerous mobile devices for parallel testing to speed up test execution and guarantee the best app performance across a range of devices, networks, and geographical regions.
Test apps on actual remote devices in real-world conditions to speed up development and quickly find and fix major flaws.
Additionally, LambdaTest offers a wide variety of advanced features that facilitate easy-to-use, effective testing. Here are a few of these features:
It has an inbuilt mobile inspector that makes it simple for testers to check the components of an app. Additionally, it enables them to record their test procedures from the same location.
It enables seamless integration with well-known technologies like Circle CI, Jenkins, Bamboo, and others to speed up DevOps and continuous delivery workflows.
Gives testers access to a variety of debugging tools for Appium testing, including text logs, network logs, device logs, Appium logs, extensive reports, and accompanying screenshots and videos for both successful test execution and complete test failure.
The test cases execution metrics reports can be retrieved whenever necessary from anywhere. This helps to support all remote team workflows.
A mobile app can now be developed utilizing a variety of technologies and programming languages. Thus, another fantastic benefit of using LambdaTest is that it covers all of the key technologies and programming languages required to support a particular set of development practices.
Furthermore, with LambdaTest, testers can benefit from manual cross-browser testing, automation testing, visual user interface testing, responsive testing, manual app testing, geolocation testing, and more, all with lifetime free access to LambdaTest.
The Prerequisites To Use Appium
There are a few prerequisites that must be installed on the system before automating apps with Appium.
Downloading and installing the JDK (Java Development Kit) and the Appium Desktop/Server.
Installing, and configuring the environment variable for Java.
Installing the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) after downloading it.
JAR file for Selenium Server.
Setting up the Eclipse IDE.
Having access to Google Play's APK app information.
js installation is not necessary. Because "Node.exe" and NPM are included by default whenever the Appium server is installed.
Integrating Appium With Lambdatest
LambdaTest integration with Appium is necessary to utilize Appium testing fully. The following actions are necessary for the integration process:
Visiting LambdaTest and creating an account.
Acquiring the API credentials needed for Appium integration. The credentials will facilitate linking the LambdaTest cloud infrastructure and the Appium tests.
Next, setting up and specifying the desired capabilities in the Appium tests to specify the device, operating system, browser, and any other essential factors that create the intended test environment and guarantee that tests are executed on the desired devices in the cloud. These configuration variables specify test environments and guarantee the smooth operation of the tests in such environments.
The next step is configuring the test execution by including the appropriate capabilities and the LambdaTest endpoint URL in the Appium test script. By doing so, the platform and the Appium tests will be connected.
Finally, run the Appium tests and keep track of their progress on the LambdaTest dashboard. The test results can then be analyzed to find any problems that require attention by examining the test reports, logs, and screenshots.
Conclusion
It may be concluded that due to Appium's cross-platform capability and simplicity of use, it has grown to be widely utilized in testing mobile applications for iOS and Android to meet the expectations of quick and dependable testing that spans numerous platforms, devices, and versions.
In comparison to alternative testing techniques, Appium offers greater efficiency, flexibility, and cost-friendliness, empowering teams to deliver excellent user experiences while utilizing the continuous delivery methodology.
It is advantageous to use Appium with a cloud testing platform like LambdaTest because it gives users access to automated test environments with cloud-hosted real mobile devices that are simple to use. The testing process is made more easy by having access to the vast array of functions offered by the cloud.
Read Also:
Which Is A Benefit Of Using Server–To–Server App Conversion Tracking Over An SDK?
Mark Stiffler Gives You 7 Ways To Automate Your Business For Success
9 Ways To Improve Efficiency At Your Manufacturing Business
