The hardware

Built on Zebra, not around it

Zebra builds the reader, the printer and the encoder. What it leaves to people like us is the part that knows your warehouse — the app that turns a tag read into “that box is on shelf 7-2-3, it arrived in March, and it's going out on Thursday.”

This is that part. Every label carries a barcode, a QR code and an encoded RFID tag at once, so the same box can be picked up by whichever reader is in someone's hand — a full RFID sled or just a phone camera.

  • ZD621R

    RFID label printer

    Encodes a unique RFID tag into every label as it prints, alongside a QR code and barcode — one label, three ways to read it.

  • TC22R

    Integrated RFID handheld

    RFID reader built into the scanner — no separate sled — reads a shelf of tags at a time.

  • TC53 + RFD9091

    Sled-mounted RFID handheld

    Higher-power reader for longer-range sweeps across a full bay in one pass.

  • AT SOURCE

    Or let the supplier label it

    Send a supplier a print file and the stock arrives already labelled and encoded — so it books in on the first scan instead of being labelled by hand on your dock.

  • any Android

    Camera-only fallback

    Every workflow — locating, moving, picking, counting — runs QR-only from a plain phone camera. Pair a Zebra sled over Bluetooth and that same phone gains full UHF RFID; unpair it and the phone still works. The handheld app is Android only today; there's no iOS build yet.

Label Printer screen showing a Zebra ZD621R detected with RFID On, live QR label preview, and an EPC capacity reference table
Label Printer — live ZD621R connection, RFID on
Reader control

The reader does
what you tell it

A UHF reader at full power reads everything — the bay in front of you, the rack behind it, and the trolley going past. That's the problem with RFID, not the feature. So the beam, and what counts as a read, are both under the operator's control.

POWER

Dial the beam to the job

Transmit power is a slider, from 10.0 up to 30.0 dBm, with Near / Mid / Full presets you can change without stopping the count.

Wind it down and the reader sees one shelf. Wind it up and it takes a whole aisle in a pass. Same gun, same tags — you decide how far the question travels.

LOCK ON

Single out one product

Scan the QR of the product you care about and the count arms to it. From then on the reader still hears everything, but only that product is counted.

Tags for anything else in range — the next bay, a pallet passing behind you — are discarded rather than quietly joining the total. Arm several products at once and it counts each one separately.

SIGNAL

Find the one you want

Reads are ranked by signal strength and badged Strong, Good or Fair, so when you're hunting a single box the top of the list is the one nearest the gun.

Walk toward it and the order re-sorts. It's how you go from "it's somewhere in this aisle" to having it in your hand.

“Could you encode the location into the tag?” On a large enough inlay, yes — and our encoder already writes the bigger 128-bit format when a tag offers it. But it's the wrong place to keep it, and on the labels running through the printer today there is nowhere to put it at all: a UCODE 9 carries a 96-bit EPC and no user memory whatsoever. Room for identity, and nothing else.

The deeper reason is that a tag storing its own location is right only until somebody moves the box by hand — after which it states the wrong shelf with complete confidence, and nothing on it admits that it's stale. Aerospace proved this on tags a thousand times larger: the data went half-right, half-wrong, with no way to tell which. So the tag carries identity, permanently, and the system carries location. Scan the serial and it tells you which bin it went into, when, and who put it there — and everywhere it has been since. Nothing to re-encode, and nothing to go quietly out of date.

A warehouse operator holding a Zebra handheld mid-scan, prompted to scan the bin they took stock P-0353 from, standing among stacked cardboard boxes
On the floor, not a demo

This is the actual screen, in an actual hand, between two actual boxes.

Every screenshot on this page comes from the same live system a real pump distributor runs their warehouse on today — not mockups, not a sandbox seeded for a sales call.

In the warehouse

The whole job, on the gun

Every warehouse workflow runs natively on the handheld — nothing is a cut-down version of the web app. This is the screen a picker, a receiver or a counter actually has in their hand.

Gun app Locate Product result for P-0094 showing Sage quantity 90, tracked quantity 122, default warehouse, and four High Wycombe Main bins holding 16, 24, 24 and 8 units, each tappable to move stock
Locate ProductEvery bin holding it, with quantities — tap one to move stock
Gun app Product Lookup result for P-0094 showing 90 total, 122 sellable, 0 holding, and assigned locations listing aisle, shelf and bin with quantity for each
Product LookupTotal, sellable and holding — down to aisle, shelf and bin
Gun app stock take screen with warehouse and location pickers, ready to start counting a single bay
Counting a bayPick the bay and sweep — it opens seeded with what's expected
Gun app Transfers screen showing a pending transfer of eight units of product P-0296 from LG-1 to HW-MAIN
TransfersA tracked pick-up-then-deliver job between sites
Gun app picking screen showing zero of two units picked for an order, with product P-0035 and a pallet line, each showing its bin location
PickingScan each unit — the line ticks as you go
Gun app Pick Lists screen showing two outbound orders, their reference numbers, pick progress and how long each has been idle
Pick ListsEvery order waiting, and how long it's idled
Gun app Complete Delivery screen showing an order staged for QP Van, ready to confirm it left the building
Complete DeliveryConfirm a staged order actually left
Gun app Stock Take screen showing an office-set reconcile task covering twenty bins, and a list of warehouses to count
Stock TakeOffice-set counts, seeded with what's expected
Gun app Move Product screen showing source and destination warehouse pickers and a scan prompt for source location
Move ProductBin-to-bin moves, fully scanned
Gun app Locations screen listing bins with red flags for unknown or not visited status
LocationsConfirmed, empty, or not yet visited
Live OCR

Point the camera.
Stop typing.

Two of the slowest, most error-prone moments in a warehouse are somebody copying a twelve-character serial off a carton by hand, and somebody trying to remember what an order looked like when it left. The camera on the gun does both jobs instead.

READS IT

The maker's serial, straight off the carton

Hold the camera to the manufacturer's own label and it reads the serial — then confirms the same value across three consecutive frames before saving it. There's no button to press and no keyboard to get wrong.

If the label isn't one it knows, the screen dims and a guide box appears: line the serial up inside it and only what's inside is read, so the phone number and the field labels printed alongside can't creep in. Or tap any block of text on screen to take it as it stands. Or type it — the keyboard never goes away.

LEARNS IT

You teach it your own suppliers

A new supplier's label is a row in a library, not a code change. Describe the label once — the text printed immediately before the serial, and the shape of the serial itself — and every gun picks it up on its next sync.

Whichever brand name the camera can see is tried first, then the rest in priority order, and the first fit wins. A strict pattern can sit in front of a looser fallback, so a supplier whose label prints badly still gets read.

PHOTOGRAPHS IT

The order, as it was packed

At despatch the picker can attach photos of the packed order before it goes. They land in the office's gallery against that sales order — what was in the box, and what condition it was in, at the moment it left the building.

When a customer rings three weeks later to say something arrived damaged or short, that is the difference between a discussion and an argument.

Nothing serialised leaves unrecorded. A serialised unit can't be despatched until its manufacturer serial has actually been captured — the line sits amber until it is. The control isn't a policy somebody has to remember; it's the button staying shut.

Serial Formats settings screen listing recognition patterns per manufacturer, each with an indicator, a template of the serial's shape, a worked example, a priority and an active status
Serial Formats — one row per supplier label, tunable by the office, synced to every gun
GET IN TOUCH

Want to see it on your own stock?

Happy to walk through a live warehouse, or run a screen-share against your own product data.

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