[RESOLVED] Rfid

Hi, can anyone shed any light on RFID for me (in particular Passive). I understand it is basically a small silicon chip with a bit of memory which can be written to to store details. These details can be read from memory by RFID readers which activate the chip to give off a radiowave enabling the chip to be read.

Please correct me if I am wrong so far!

No I have some dumb questions.

Is anybody working with this technology here? I presume most people are using third party software to read and write the data or are people creating windows apps themselves?

What exacly is a reader? I presume it has to scan a particular label or pass through something else a factory full of products containing RFID labels would constantly be emitting radio waves to the nearest reader?

Where do RFID printers come into this? What exactly is it printing?

What are the costs?

I have been brought to the attention of this stuff as I was looking into barcode thermal printers we plan to use to label and identify our products, is RFID just an alternative?

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Originally Posted by FishGuy

These details can be read from memory by RFID readers which activate the chip to give off a radiowave enabling the chip to be read.

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Pretty close. The chip "retransmits" a modified version of the original signal - sort of.

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I presume most people are using third party software to read and write the data or are people creating windows apps themselves?

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That depends on what the particular manufacturer supplies as a reader. If it's a serial device you just use an MSComm control to interface with it, or you use supplied source code, an ocx ... there's no absolute standard.

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... a factory full of products containing RFID labels would constantly be emitting radio waves to the nearest reader?

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The reader is constantly transmitting, noting when the transmitted signal is modified by a tag.

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Where do RFID printers come into this? What exactly is it printing?

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That would depend on what's stored in the chip (usually just a serial number or ID number of some sort), and what the end user (your customer) wants done with the information (that this particular chip has just been read by this particular reader.) In a lot of situations there wouldn't be a printer associated with the reading program - the information would just be entered into a database. Some other program, later on, might print up bills based on the data that was obtained.

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I was looking into barcode thermal printers we plan to use to label and identify our products, is RFID just an alternative?

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Not really. Barcodes are human readable (if you print the numbers on the labels, as well as the bars) and a paper label is a lot cheaper than an RFID device, but it can't be read from 25 feet away, except under ideal conditions. Which is best depends on the actual situation. A cheap throw-away label on the outside of the product? A paper barcode label. A permanent internal label just to identify the particular product? Maybe an RFID device.

ALL42 has right. But with RFID you can store more data. Think of “Out of date” and serial numbers. Also some tracking data like where to go next. Also more then 1 tag can be read in once. You don’t have to unpack a palette to scan. In warehousing this becomes the product.