Vega-Absolute · GPS hardware · fleet telematics
Thousands of GPS beacons, given a platform
The hardware shipped without software, so the beacons had no practical use until the platform existed.
- Our scope
- Platform, the server the beacons talk to, telemetry storage, deployment to hardened servers, 12 months of support. Electronics and firmware stayed with the client.
- Timeline
- 4 months to handover
- Stack
- Vue · PHP · ClickHouse · PostgreSQL · Docker
The task
Vega-Absolute manufactures GPS beacons and sells them to logistics companies. The hardware was finished; there was no platform to receive telemetry or manage the devices.
Without the software side, customers could not track vehicles and the manufacturer could not push firmware. The company builds electronics and has no web team, so the entire software side came to us.
What we built
A platform that takes telemetry straight from the beacons, shows vehicles moving on a map, watches device charge and delivers firmware updates. Managers handle staff, groups and organisations; dispatchers follow routes and idle time and work out fuel.
Three things went sideways. ClickHouse had no driver for our stack, so we wrote one. The protocol spec turned out to describe a different firmware version than the devices we had, so the beacon server was rewritten against the real ones. And GPS is not accurate everywhere in Russia, so positions are also computed from cell towers and merged with the satellite fix.
Result
We tested it in the field, not only on a bench: for several months the team drove test beacons around and tracked their own routes. Before launch the platform was load-tested with more than a thousand devices.
Four months from the first test devices to handover, with the servers hardened, the project documented and twelve months of support. Vega-Absolute rolled it out to logistics companies itself, so we have no confirmed figures from commercial operation.