[HN Gopher] Show HN: A Modern Palletization App
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Show HN: A Modern Palletization App
When searching on the internet for these type of apps, I didn't
find many that were open-source AND easy to use. A lot of them had
complicated interfaces, although they had loads of features as
well. So what I had in mind when making Stack Solver was an app
with a modern interface that has the most essential features. It is
also well integrated with Microsoft Excel and renders a 3D
customizable drawing. Stack Solver is programmed in C# using the
WPF framework to ensure it is fast and light. The interface is
built using WPF UI, a library that allows it to keep up with modern
trends (specifically the Fluent design). It is a work in progress
with tons of new features planned and it is my first "serious"
project so I would appreciate any feedback :)
Author : vld5
Score : 118 points
Date : 2024-06-26 20:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| aiiotnoodle wrote:
| Stuff like this is great.
|
| Fast moving consumer goods is a vastly underrated represented
| technology sector, they do so much cool stuff that just goes
| completely unnoticed.
|
| I started my first job in a warehouse and it really gave me a
| good look at the proprietary technology powering day to day life.
| It should be more open but few work on stuff like this.
| KomoD wrote:
| Not something I have a use for, but that's pretty cool.
| Animats wrote:
| Robot palletizers use such algorithms, but do humans need a
| program for this?
|
| Another case of _" Machines should think. People should work."_
| chime wrote:
| Absolutely. Pallet arrangements are usually a required spec
| from the customer to the vendor. The arrangement order matters
| considerably for shipping and needs to be agreed upon
| beforehand.
| Closi wrote:
| Looks great! If you did do something related to truck fill, would
| be great to see if it could be generalised to 3D bin packing.
|
| I'm currently working a free / open source warehouse management
| system so great to see other people working on supply chain
| problems!
| tomtom1337 wrote:
| This sounds interesting! Have you published it yet?
| Closi wrote:
| Not yet but will shoot you a message when I do!
| tomtom1337 wrote:
| I would appreciate that! Please do!
| rabotnik wrote:
| Would love to hear more about a FOSS WMS - which aspects are
| you focusing on initially?
| Closi wrote:
| Amazing! I'm trying to make a WMS that's very easy to
| customise (rather than configure) - will come with a highly
| opinionated set of base processes but then will be built in a
| way that it's incredibly easy to edit them (rather than
| building a million parameters/toggles).
|
| Handset processes are installed like apps.
| avgDev wrote:
| I would maybe like to contribute to WMS. Wrote a WMS for a
| company I work for.
|
| I use .net, C#, SQL, blazor.
| bobim wrote:
| Ah! That's a pretty much orphan subject yet the world is
| constantly moving pallets.
|
| For pallet stability you would like to have a convex perimeter so
| the stretch wrapping maintains the boxes effectively. And also
| criss-crossing boxes for shear resistance.
|
| But you need to align as much boxes corners as possible to get
| vertical stiffness.
|
| A solver proposing stacking patterns with these constraints would
| be outstanding.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Does center of mass matter? Or not so much.
|
| Should lighter boxes be higher, so they don't get crushed? Or
| again, doesn't matter.
| bobim wrote:
| Yes right, I'm biased toward single product pallet. Then high
| mass items should be placed on the first lower pallet, low
| mass on the pallet put on top of the first one in the truck.
| The solver starts to be complex.
| bobim wrote:
| And if it can spit out an OpenRadioss input file, one could
| launch pallets (almost) directly.
| FredPret wrote:
| The humble pallet is the red blood cell of civilization.
|
| There's a ton of really cool optimization ideas like this in
| Industrial Engineering - factory production schedule
| optimizations, path optimizations, lots of knapsack problems.
| What a treat that there are people willing to pay for this kind
| of work.
| bobim wrote:
| Nice analogy!
| a3n wrote:
| I agree, very nice.
|
| I'm a truck driver. My analogy, zooming out a bit, is that
| the entire road system, at least the National Network, is a
| system of interconnecting and overlapping conveyor belts.
|
| The trailers are trays on the belt.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Network
| FredPret wrote:
| Shipping containers are another genius-level invention -
| even better than wheels on luggage.
|
| They used individual crates before!
| a3n wrote:
| Fun fact: inside many of the trailers you see, it's just
| manually loaded and stacked, and manually unloaded,
| individual boxes. No pallets.
|
| Not most. But many.
|
| Another fun fact: US/NATO logistics is pallet-based.
| Russian is largely not.
|
| Unloading shells on a hot day in a "bucket brigade" must
| be fun.
| FredPret wrote:
| True - still a lot better than painstakingly offloading a
| ship's cargo onto trains and trucks and vice versa, one
| crate at a time. All of civilization runs a good deal
| faster and better because of shipping containers
| rbaudibert wrote:
| I've had some friends in the logistics industry ask about a
| mobile app for this. How hard would it be to convert that to
| mobile? Are you depending on some complex libraries for the
| solver, or did you implement the algorithm yourself? I have 0 to
| no knowledge of C#.
| vld5 wrote:
| I implemented the algorithm myself and although I don't have
| much experience with mobile apps programming I think that
| converting it to other programming languages or adapting it for
| other frameworks would be fairly easy. The real problem is the
| 3D rendering which is done using WPF 3D (Windows only), so I
| would need to completely rework it.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Even if mobile v1 was simple level by level text output, it'd
| probably still be useful.
| vld5 wrote:
| Probably yes. Implementing only the text output should be
| very simple. Anyways, I'll look into it.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Moving to Avalonia from WPF should be relatively
| straightforward (except, possibly, the WPF 3D part), and
| Avalonia is capable of targeting mobile platforms (even
| though it really is desktop-first, when compared to Uno or
| MAUI). As a bonus it will run on macOS and Linux too.
| crote wrote:
| If you're going to rework it, perhaps consider making it a
| web app? Wrap it in Electron for desktop use, I bet there's
| something similar for iOS / Android.
|
| That'd make it available as both a dedicated app for power
| users, _and_ an (ad-supported) variant for occasional use.
| sirjaz wrote:
| Amazing job, love seeing native apps like this rather than
| webapps. Keep it up!
| maw wrote:
| I tried to make some sort of joke or pun based off of shipping
| containerized software, I couldn't make it work. Oh well.
| datboi2hawt wrote:
| Thanks for this! We ditched our Tops Pallet software a year ago
| and have been looking for something similar. Where can we donate
| to the development?
| jayfiro wrote:
| We considered using Tops Pallet software at one point. What
| made you ditch it?
| vld5 wrote:
| I just set up a donation page, you can find it on the github
| repo page, on the right. But please keep in mind that for now I
| have to finish my exams so you may have to wait a bit for new
| features. Also, any feedback and suggestions for improvement
| are appreciated especially since you work in the field.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I suppose this would be useful for large supply chains. Once you
| get away from that and move to shipping from warehouse to store,
| though, this would be a largely be a waste of time. Stacking a
| pallet with various different sized boxes and shapes is a bit of
| an art form that is largely learned through trial and error until
| you "get" it (I was on a full time night stock crew while I was
| in college). It would literally take more time for workers to
| refer to the layout than it would for them to simply stack the
| goods onto the pallet.
| rabotnik wrote:
| Pallet stacking can also be done automatically (with robots),
| and there are solutions (only privately developed/owned to my
| knowledge) that calculate optimal stacking for heterogeneous
| loads - interlock boxes for stability, weight (distribution &
| total), height, etc. Each box is characterized on induct
| (weighed, scanned, sometimes manually updated with metadata on
| crushability/fragility). Then an algo figures out best way to
| put the boxes on a pallet. I've seen this for grocery, but
| applicable in other use cases.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It's only time-consuming for workers to follow the planned
| layout when those workers are human.
| thy77 wrote:
| Just lasted 2 days moving pallets barrels and cylinders. I needed
| the customers to accept non-full 300 lb barrels instead of the
| full 500 lb. Couldn't do it. Pallets and wrapping were to load a
| bit easier but often we cut the shrink wrap at the first stop and
| the pallet had stuff for like 3 stops. Seems like the shrink wrap
| was practical to keep stuff from flying around but also
| regulatory, cops could write a ticket.
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