● CASE STUDY · IDENTIUM TECH SOLUTIONS
RaceFlow Pro
RFID race timing that reads like a live broadcast.
OVERVIEW
RaceFlow Pro times races with passive UHF RFID. Runners wear RFID bibs, overhead antennas read them at speed, and the platform turns raw tag reads into clean splits, live positions, public leaderboards and finisher certificates. It scales from a 100-runner club event to a 10,000-entrant multi-day marathon with eight split points.
THE CHALLENGE
Race timing is a hard real-time problem dressed up as a consumer product. Thousands of reads a minute have to dedupe into accurate splits, spectators expect the leaderboard to feel instant, and all of it has to run on a laptop at a start line with flaky venue Wi-Fi. The reader also speaks a raw binary protocol with no friendly SDK.
WHAT I BUILT
- 01
Hand-wrote the binary protocol for Identium IHZ4/R2000 readers over raw TCP sockets: a documented hex command dictionary (start/stop inventory, set power, read TID), CRC-16 packet framing, and a frame parser that pulls EPC length from the PC bits along with signed RSSI.
- 02
Built two-gate anti-cheat. Reads before the gun get quarantined to a phantom-reads archive, and an RSSI-based photo-finish rule breaks near-simultaneous crossings.
- 03
Designed a custom design system with domain tokens, glassmorphism and full dark mode across 30+ screens, plus ~16 hand-authored animations.
- 04
Shipped an Electron 'Reader Console' companion with an in-process TCP relay and an on-disk offline queue with retry, so a dropped venue network never loses a read.
- 05
Generated branded PDF finisher certificates per participant and an embeddable results widget event sites can drop in.
OUTCOME
A live, versioned product (v5.6.2) that reads like a broadcast graphic. RFID hardware precision with consumer-grade polish, and I designed, architected and built it solo.
GALLERY
