PBP Smart Resort OS

The brief

Beach clubs still run their beaches by hand: who has which sunbed, which umbrella is open, whether a guest is waiting for a waiter. PBP Solutions puts a smart unit on every spot, with a motorised umbrella, a PIN safe, phone charging, mist and shower, a call button and a touch screen.

We were asked to build the software behind those units: one place where operators see and run the whole beach, from a few units on a pilot beach up to large resorts, and in a white-label form for partners.

What we built

Resort OS, the web app for operators and staff

• Live view: the beach as a map of zones and spots, coloured by status (in use, free, needs attention, fault, offline), with occupancy, open umbrellas, waiter calls, alerts and average battery at a glance. One click opens or closes every umbrella in a zone.
• Spot panel: every control the unit supports (umbrella, safe, mist, shower, fan, charging), battery and solar history, device details and remote settings.
• Bookings with a safe PIN: staff book a spot for a guest and the platform generates a one-time PIN for the safe. Only a salted hash of it ever reaches the unit.
• Service queue: waiter calls, bill requests and guest orders in one list, oldest first, with "On my way" and "Served".
• Devices: the whole fleet with battery, solar, signal and firmware, over-the-air updates, a health and fault timeline, and retiring old units.
• Setup: a new unit is added by scanning the QR code on its screen, and installers set up the venue's Wi-Fi.
• Menu, guest QR codes and team roles: the menu guests order from, printable QR codes per spot, and owner, manager, staff and installer roles. Managers get an email when a unit goes offline, a battery runs low or a motor is blocked.

The guest page

Each spot's QR code opens a mobile page where guests order from the menu and call a waiter.

The platform the units connect to

• An encrypted MQTT connection between every unit and the cloud, with its own login and access rules per device.
• Telemetry history, and signed firmware updates with rollback.
• Claiming a new unit by QR code, with no cables or config files.
• A load-tested path for incoming data, and simulators that run whole fleets end to end.
• A reference adapter for the units' ESP32-S3 firmware that implements the same protocol.

The stack

• Web: TypeScript, React with TanStack Start, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui and Recharts.
• Data and sign-in: Postgres on Neon with the Drizzle ORM, and Better Auth for organisations and roles.
• Hosting: Vercel, with Vercel Blob for firmware images.
• Device messaging: EMQX (MQTT 5 over TLS).
• Firmware: C with ESP-IDF on the ESP32-S3, and LVGL for the touch screen.
• Email and testing: Resend, Vitest, and end-to-end and load-test simulators.

Our role

The software: Resort OS, the guest page, the platform the units connect to and the firmware reference adapter. PBP's public website, at the start of the video, is the work of their design team. It is the kind of work we do as custom software development and cloud and DevOps.

What comes next

A real prototype unit has run against the live platform since October 2026. Next come batched data intake on a larger cloud messaging service, one gateway per beach with the units pairing to it wirelessly, integrations with POS and booking systems, a battery and solar dashboard, and the final scalable architecture by March 2027.