Mining Tire Tracker
A tire on a quarry dump truck costs $10,000 to $80,000. A large mining fleet runs hundreds of them. Fraud, premature write-offs, and undocumented swaps carry real money at those prices, yet most sites still track tires on spreadsheets, or not at all.
The problem is physical. RFID tags embedded in tires at manufacture read only at close range with a stationary reader, so every reading means stopping the truck. Passive inventory checks happen a few times a year and miss everything that happens in between.
We wrote firmware that drives a real UHF module. An STM32F103C8 “Blue Pill” board talks to a JRD-100/QM100 UHF RFID module over UART, sending its binary command frames (0xBB...0x7E) to read hardware and software versions, set the operating region (China 900MHz, China 800MHz, US, EU, Korea), read and set transmit power, and trigger single reads or bulk tag-storage reads. The code parses the module’s response frames into EPC and RSSI strings and reports its own error codes back over serial. It targets a bare UHF module on a bench, not a phone or a case.
Three board designs, none of them built. We laid out three PCBs in EasyEDA, all around an ESP32-SOLO-1 module. One is a handheld reader powered by an 18650 cell through an MCP73831 lithium-ion charge controller, with an NCP1529 switching regulator feeding the RF stage. A second uses the same ESP32-SOLO-1 and charge circuit but runs just over half the length of the handheld board, shaped to fit inside a phone case rather than a standalone housing. A third swaps the ESP32 for a Wiznet W5500 Ethernet controller with an RJ45 jack and a TPS54331 buck converter, aimed at a fixed gateway reader rather than something a technician carries. We found the schematics and PCB layouts for all three. We found no photos of a populated board, so these are unbuilt designs, not tested hardware.
A React Native app reached demo screens, not live data. In September 2022 we built mems_uhf, an app with two screens: a scanner list that pairs over classic Bluetooth with react-native-bluetooth-classic, and a scan-info screen. That second screen renders a card labeled “Belaz” with a unit number, mileage, tire position, and tire mileage, the same fields this page used to promise. The card’s values are hardcoded in the component. A TODO in the source says to read them from the store once the scanner sends real data. That wiring never happened, and four commits over five days is as far as the app got.
On September 13, 2022, the app’s git history was overwritten with a blank README; the React Native code survives only on an orphaned master branch. In March 2023, a different engineer added the STM32 firmware to the now-empty main branch. Nothing has shipped since. The sibling repository set aside for the cloud backend never received any code beyond GitLab’s default project template.
We’re calling this postponed, not active. What exists doesn’t connect: firmware for a bare UHF module, three PCB designs that were never populated, and an app that demos a mock card instead of a live scan. Reviving it means picking one board, building and testing it against the STM32 or ESP32 firmware, wiring the app to real tag data instead of the Belaz placeholder, and starting the backend from zero.