Cargo Tracker

Sensitive shipments — medical equipment, wine, vaccines, precision instruments — can be damaged or tampered with between sender and recipient with no one knowing until the crate is opened. Existing tracking solutions tell you where cargo is; they rarely tell you what happened to it en route.

Cargo Tracker is two things that work together.

The device. A compact, autonomous black box that rides inside the shipment. It logs temperature, humidity, pressure, and impact events to internal flash with no network dependency — it stores everything and uploads when connectivity is available. Unlike most single-use monitoring labels, it’s reusable. Smaller than most competitors. An app retrieves the log via Bluetooth and pushes it to the cloud; the recipient can scan the device on arrival to get a full chain-of-custody record.

The platform. A web dashboard that aggregates status events from carrier APIs (rail, regional trucking, last-mile) alongside the device telemetry. Coordinators see current location, ETA, customs clearance status, delay flags, and environmental condition graphs in one view — without logging into five separate portals. Route templates and notification rules cover customs holds, ETA deviations, POD confirmations, and condition threshold breaches.

The platform backend uses NestJS with a carrier-adapter pattern so new logistics providers integrate in days. Alerts route to email, Telegram, and webhook. The device prototype is at TRL 4.

Engineering at a glance

• Stage: seeking a pilot. We have a device prototype and no paid pilot yet.
• Effort: about 370 engineering hours, four engineers, March 2020 to May 2022.
• Device firmware: STM32F103C8 on PlatformIO with STM32duino Low Power. We moved the work onto STM32 in June 2020.
• Sensing and storage: MPU6050 accelerometer for impact events, an SPI flash library for the log, BLE through an HM-10 module for the transfer.
• Power: sleep mode (July 2020), wake on button press and BLE data transfer, power-consumption measurements (August 2021).
• Hardware: first PCB made and populated in June 2021; prototype fixes in April 2022; a unit-cost estimate in May 2022.
• Phone app: React Native with react-native-ble-plx and MobX, built in March 2020.

Need a team that ships hardware, firmware and cloud like this? Talk to us.