One device, honest constraints
We specified a single ESP32-based unit with cellular and BLE, sized the power budget for a five-year service interval, and proved it in a forty-vehicle winter trial before scaling.
Logistics & transport · 2025
Putting 4,200 cold-chain vehicles on one live map
Custom telemetry hardware, firmware and an ingestion platform that cut cold-chain spoilage claims by 61% across a 4,200-vehicle fleet.
9 months
Engagement length
8 specialists
Delivery team
-61%
Spoilage claims
2.4M
Events ingested daily
The situation
What we walked into.
Temperature excursions in refrigerated trailers were discovered on delivery, when the load was already lost. Three telematics vendors covered different regions with incompatible data, drivers logged temperatures on paper, and insurers were disputing claims for lack of evidence.
Client profile
Client
Logistics operator
Industry
Logistics & transport
Duration
9 months
Team
8 specialists
Approach
The decisions that mattered.
Not a chronology — the four calls that determined how the project turned out.
Store and forward by default
Firmware buffers readings through dead zones and reconciles on reconnect, so a tunnel or a rural route never creates a gap in the evidence chain.
Ingestion built for spikes
MQTT into Kafka into TimescaleDB with downsampling, sized for depot mornings when thousands of vehicles reconnect within minutes of each other.
Alerts operators trust
Threshold and rate-of-change alerting tuned against historical data to kill false positives, delivered to dispatchers and drivers in time to act.
What we shipped
Delivered scope.
- Custom ESP32 telemetry unit with cellular and BLE fallback
- Zephyr-based firmware with signed staged OTA updates
- Store-and-forward buffering for offline routes
- Kafka and TimescaleDB ingestion at 2.4M events per day
- Live fleet map, digital twin and excursion alerting
- Immutable temperature audit records for insurance claims
Technology
ESP32Zephyr RTOSRustMQTTKafkaTimescaleDBAWS IoT CoreGrafana
Results
What changed for the business.
-61%
Cold-chain spoilage claims
-31%
Unplanned maintenance visits
4,200
Vehicles on a single platform
<9s
Sensor reading to dispatcher alert
- Three regional telematics contracts consolidated into one platform, cutting per-vehicle cost by 44%.
- Insurers accepted the audit trail as primary evidence, shortening claim cycles from weeks to days.
- Predictive maintenance signals from compressor telemetry now trigger service before failure.
The winter trial is what sold it internally. They found three failure modes in forty vehicles that would have cost us a fortune across four thousand.
Logistics operator
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