Inspiration
At WhaleTale, we build hardware in Baku, Azerbaijan, that is usually imported: border gates, biometric terminals, smart locks, transit systems, and flight controllers. We do the full cycle in-house, from the first sketch and our own PCB to a deployed product.
The problem was that almost nobody could see any of it. Our work lived in prototypes, test videos, and internal docs. When we talked to partners, we kept explaining the same systems from scratch. We wanted one place that shows what we've built, how each system works end to end, and that a small team really does carry everything from circuit board to cloud dashboard. This portfolio site is that place.
What it does
The site is a bilingual (English / Russian) showcase of our embedded and IoT builds. Each product gets its own page explaining the hardware, the firmware, and the software around it. The five core builds are:
- E-Gate: an automated border-control gate. It combines a turnstile with emergency release, an RFID/NFC document reader, fingerprint and face scanners, and UV/IR document-authenticity checks. A traveler places their document, the gate reads and verifies it, then runs multi-factor biometric matching with anti-spoofing. Only then does it unlock. Incidents are pushed to an operator in real time.
- E-Padlock: a GPS-tracked smart padlock for international cargo. It has a hardened steel, waterproof body and opens only with an encrypted NFC card. Vibration, shock, accelerometer, and gyroscope sensors detect tampering and raise alarms instantly. It also supports geofencing, timestamped event logs, and a battery rated for up to two years.
- Fingerprint Controller: a biometric terminal that verifies attendance for court-ordered community work. It stores up to 10,000 templates locally so it keeps working offline, and pairs fingerprints with RFID cards. Liveness checks analyze tissue and temperature to reject fake fingerprints. It connects over Wi-Fi with 4G LTE as a backup.
- Bus Manager: cloud-managed media panels for public transit. It announces stops with synced audio and video, shows GPS-targeted ads, and uses computer vision on onboard cameras to count passengers getting on and off at every stop.
- Flight Controller: our own flight-controller board for drones of any size. It integrates gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, and GPS in an IP67 enclosure. The autopilot supports manual to fully autonomous flight, return-to-home, obstacle avoidance, emergency landing, and telemetry logging.
How we built it
The site. It's a lightweight static multi-page site: one landing page with a project grid, plus a dedicated page for each product. It has an EN/RU language switch, real test footage of the E-Gate and drone in flight, and a contact form. We deliberately avoided a heavy framework. The content is the point, and it needed to load fast on any connection.
The products behind it. Every build on the site follows the same stack we use across the company:
- Custom hardware. We design the PCB, select the sensors, and build the enclosure in-house.
- Firmware handles sensor fusion, cryptography, and local decision-making, so devices keep working when the network drops.
- Secure transport. Encrypted channels and VPN tunnels carry data to the backend, with backup links like LTE or satellite where uptime matters.
- Web dashboards let operators manage fleets of devices in real time.
Bus Manager shows the pattern well. Each camera produces boarding and alighting counts per stop, and occupancy is tracked as a running sum along the route:
$$ O_k = O_{k-1} + \text{in}_k - \text{out}_k, \qquad O_0 = 0 $$
Summed across a route, $\sum_k \text{in}_k$ gives total ridership. That number feeds both route optimization and an audience estimate for advertisers.
Challenges we ran into
- Making hardware legible on a web page. A border gate or flight controller is dense with subsystems. We had to explain each product so that a partner understands it in a minute and an engineer still finds it credible.
- Two languages, one voice. Writing every product page in both English and Russian, and keeping technical terms consistent between them, took far more care than we expected.
- Video without killing load times. Real test footage is our strongest proof, but it's heavy. We had to balance showing the hardware working with keeping the site fast on mobile.
- Sensitive products. Several builds serve border control, justice, and security. We had to describe what they do in useful detail without exposing anything that would weaken their security.
- Ten products, one coherent story. Grouping very different builds, from a padlock to a drone, under one consistent design and narrative was its own design problem.
What we learned
- The hardest part of a hardware company's website is translation, in both senses: between languages, and between engineering detail and what someone actually needs to know.
- Real footage beats renders. A ten-second clip of the gate opening says more than a paragraph.
- Designing every layer ourselves, board, firmware, and dashboard, is our biggest advantage. Making that visible is what the site is for.
What's next
We plan to add deeper technical write-ups for each build, more test footage, and case studies from deployments as our pilots move into the field.
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