The Tyre Collective

Brief

The Tyre Collective chose to work with Embedism to develop their TC04 retro-fit device that can be fitted to vehicles up to 4 tonnes. Embedism was commissioned to design the electronics and firmware for TC04, working in collaboration with The Tyre Collective’s internal mechanical engineering team and IoT team. The end goal of the project was to produce a small batch of units suitable for on-vehicle testing, and implementation into the wider Tyre Collective data collection platform as well as being able to place order for a larger volume of devices in 2025

Ideation

Utilising Embedism’s prior experience with progressing prototypes towards production-ready hardware, and The Tyre Collective’s deep knowledge of the use-case, the two teams successfully collaborated to conceive a device that reduced the complexity of the existing prototypes.

By eliminating the need for “always connected” functionality through careful design of a data collection and offloading paradigm, the running cost of each TC04 unit could be reduced along with requirements for SIM card management and provisioning.

The physical embodiment of the device was led by the Tyre Collective’s team, with Embedism suggesting internal layouts and system designs to allow robust communication between the two internal PCBs - one for power supply control and the other for networking and file management tasks.

Hardware Design

Through three design iterations, the high-level design was refined to yield a tightly-coupled electronic and mechanical solution.

The design was completed using completely open-source CAD and firmware tooling to reduce The Tyre Collective’s ongoing operating costs by avoiding expensive software subscriptions.

The design was completed with compliance testing in mind, along with methods to allow The Tyre Collective’s internal team to physically program devices without disassembling TC04 units.

Firmware Design

Robust firmware is critical for every product, especially throughout the testing and production stages, as the team working higher up the IoT stack needs to be able to rely on the firmware to operate in the intended way, as does the end user.

Embedism designed and wrote firmware for both MCUs operating within the TC04, handling tasks between the two gracefully and allowing both physical and wireless operation through a CLI and web portal running on the device.

Features include offloading log files, syncing system time, updating firmware over the air, and updating configuration parameters. The device syncs seamlessly over WiFi with TTCs Depot Gateway hub. For field service and maintenance reasons, there is an optional serial connection using proprietary hardware.

Testing and Integration

Embedism conducted knowledge transfer and offered ongoing support to the Tyre Collective Team to assist them in bringing future development in-house and to ensure that toolchains were correctly configured so that internal teams can implement new features quickly, and without external involvement or support.

In partnership with an all electric last mile delivery fleet, The Tyre Collective installed TC04 devices on 5 Ford eTransits in Autumn 2024. Each vehicle drove an average of 55 days over the 10-week trial. In total, the five vans drove over 47,000 miles.

Initial analysis showed that the samples captured by TC04 devices comprised over 85% TRWP (Tyre and Road Wear Particles), 99% was under 100 microns, and 15% was under 10 microns (PM10) by weight. This pilot successfully validated the functionality and reliability of the new electronic hardware and firmware with minimal downtime, allowing them to gather valuable test data for future development.