Mining Tire Tracker

A single tire on a quarry dump truck costs $10,000–$80,000. A large mining fleet runs hundreds of them. At those prices, the economics of fraud, premature write-offs, and undocumented swaps are significant — yet most sites track tires on spreadsheets or not at all.

The problem is physical: RFID tags embedded in tires at manufacture are readable only at close range with stationary readers, which means logging a reading requires stopping the vehicle. Passive inventory-style checks happen infrequently and miss in-service events.

Mining Tire Tracker solves this with a portable scanner that fits over a smartphone like a case. The scanner reads tire-embedded tags through up to 50 cm of material using an extended Bluetooth antenna — enough to read without stopping the truck. The antenna module is swappable to extend range further as the application requires.

Every reading creates a timestamped event: tire position on the vehicle, mileage state, and any flagged incident (impact, overload, pressure anomaly if TPMS data is integrated). The cloud platform maintains a full lifecycle record per tire — installation, transfers between vehicles, repair events, and eventual write-off — with every event tied to a specific user and timestamp.

Supervisors see the current tire-to-vehicle map, receive alerts when a tire moves without a logged transfer, and get projected replacement timelines based on accumulated mileage.

A 3D-printed prototype scanner was built and tested in 2022. A warm commercial lead exists through a friendly supplier of quarry tires. Seeking a pilot site for field validation.