APM Terminals Itajaí is located in the Port of Itajaí, Brazil's second largest container port. The terminal has four berths totaling 1,035 meters. With a draught of 14 meters it can receive vessels up to 366 meters in length with a capacity of around 9,000 TEU. APM Terminals Itajaí is 100% owned by APM Terminals. The company has plans to invest USD 70 million to improve the capacity of the terminal by more than 30% if the government extends its current concession, which expires in 2023. The intention is to extend this up to 2044.

The client needed local solutions to secure the entrance of multiple terminals in the port. These areas are parking lots for containers; old trucks carry containers to these areas before being loaded to ships or after being unloaded from them. I started in this project as a freelancer for a new venture of four other partners with multiple backgrounds that saw an opportunity to create a system to fulfill that demand. I started working together with a project manager to coordinate the software part, which was still to be defined. After four months of various meetings and visits to the port, working around heavy machinery and under the summer sun in Brazil that can reach 40 degrees, I was invited to be a partner of a new venture called Five Intl, which aimed to provide a complete solution to control the entrance of these container parking areas.

After using Google Sketchup to sketch the solution's infrastructure, I moved to code in C++ & Qt, a solution to be running on Intel NUCs placed in the entrances, receiving input from the cameras and processing the optical character recognition over the images and synchronizing that with external servers. I was also regularly traveling 1 hour to the port to review the solution's deployment, learning electronics to connect relays to outside cameras' illumination. It was an incredible adventure, learning things on the fly to deploy an embedded solution in a hostile environment full of heavy machines and high temperatures.

The solution was deployed around September 2014 and ran for a year with various iterations during its deployment. It posed a huge challenge to maintain a solution like this. Trucks frequently appeared without plates or in a precarious state; equipment was hit or stolen, integration servers were interrupted because of cables being broken. In 2015 I decided to leave Brazil and move to Germany, which meant my part was sold, and later the company itself was incorporated by a rival that was a bit more advanced in its endeavor.