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?