May 7, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Planes, Trains, and Cows?
May 8, 2008 at 9:49 am
I want to take a shot at heading off the folks who are going to bi... er .. complain about RFID being invasive to personal privacy. Right now the technology is only good enough to read the high power tags at 6 inches (5.24 cm). Those are the big bulky things about the size of a business card and thick as a big coin. The small thin ones are good out to less than half of that.
ATBCharles Kincaid
May 8, 2008 at 9:59 am
Charles Kincaid (5/8/2008)
I want to take a shot at heading off the folks who are going to bi... er .. complain about RFID being invasive to personal privacy. Right now the technology is only good enough to read the high power tags at 6 inches (5.24 cm). Those are the big bulky things about the size of a business card and thick as a big coin. The small thin ones are good out to less than half of that.
Hmm... we had an RFID pilot pilot @ one of the hospitals, and we were getting some readings from 12-18" away. Not consistently, but enough that it would have been problematic (semi-private rooms only tend to have a 30" separation between patients, so equipment between the beds could pick up something "bad").
Like any other radio signal - its strength diffuses at an inverse-squared rate based on distance from transmitter, so the actual field can be quite a bit larger than the "rated distance".
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
May 8, 2008 at 10:02 am
Also, it's a spherical dispersion, correct? It radiates in all directions, unlike a bar code that must be read from a specific side.
May 8, 2008 at 10:06 am
Steve Jones - Editor (5/8/2008)
Also, it's a spherical dispersion, correct? It radiates in all directions, unlike a bar code that must be read from a specific side.
The actual shape of the RFID device (and how much surrounding material there is) has some amount of effect on how it disperses, but roughly speaking - yes, that's my understanding.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
May 8, 2008 at 10:18 am
Matt: Right on. You crank up the power to increase the distance and you get false reads and good reads from wrong tags. The tag gets its power to transmit from the power sent to it by the reader. Remember the days when they used to use low frequency high power radio waves for some kind of therapy? Do they still do that? The shielding on those things was not great and the harmonics would tear up the short wave bands for miles around hospitals.
See. Tesla was right. Sort of.
Steve: Not quite. The transmitters must use directional antennae. The field is like a 3-D tear drop with the point at the sender. The tags use a flat spiral for receiving and sending. They work best off the flat sides and almost not at all from the ends.
Well all that time pushing the watts up spout at the FM station pays off. Boy is this off topic or what?
ATBCharles Kincaid
May 8, 2008 at 11:45 am
laughed when I saw the article... have written a couple systems to integrate with RFID equipment... even one for cow's!!!
a company I was contracting too had a setup a pilot for a feed system for dairy cows... each cow had been tagged on the ear with an RFID tag, and when it walked into the feeding enclosure the tag would be read to identify the cow... once the cow was identified it's specific feed was mixed, put into a little buggy which ran on a track around the top of the enclosure (it was so cool when it went whizzing past), and the buggy would dump the feed at the feeding bay the specific cow was at... the feed mix was determined by samples taken daily of each cows milk and the computer would calculate what feed mix was needed for the next feed dependent on what vitamins and minerals were deficient in the milk...
not too sure of what happened to the system, if it ever got past pilot stage or not... all I know is that my bit worked 🙂
done lots of RFID stuff though... there isn't enough standardization out there though... way too many RFID manufacturers all using varying standards, each with different strengths and weaknesses... seen a solution on a motor manufacturers shop floor where they used two different makes of tags that used different frequencies... the one tag gave the range required, and was cost effective, but wouldn't last in the paint shop's extreme heat, so a tougher, but more expensive tag with less range was used there... they had to swap tags before the car went into the paint shop!!!
from a SQL side, the way most of the systems I wrote used two databases... one smaller one which was written to by the application interfacing with the readers... you need fast response times when interfacing with readers... in particular if the reader has no cache of any kind, and just streams data across the network... so the smaller the database the better... I then used a second database that held all the historical data, this was a lot larger, as it maintained a full history of transactions, but it wasn't strictly a data warehouse ... the data was fed immediately from the smaller database into the larger database, and groomed normally in a nightly batch job from the smaller database... you might think its a bit silly if you're writing the data immediately from the small database to the large database to maintain two... but the rationale was that if there was a delay in writing the data from the small DB to the large DB due to performance it was fine as it could catch up when things are quiet, but if there was a delay in writing data to the small DB from the RFID network, there was the potential the data was lost forever... the small DB essentially acted as a buffer to prevent data loss, while the larger DB was where all the operational dashboards were run off, and reporting done from... actually similar sort of architecture to MOM/SCOM, where there is an operations manager database and a separate data warehouse for reporting and trending...
anyway RFID rocks, but will take a little while to reach critical mass until their is a decent level of standardization in the industry...
May 8, 2008 at 12:06 pm
So how long will it be before Homeland Security requires all air travelers to have an RFID in their ear?
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=rfid-power
"Now Hitachi, the maker of that chip, is aiming even smaller. Last year it announced a working version of a chip only 0.05 mm on a side and 0.005 mm thick. Almost invisible, this prototype has one sixty-fourth the area yet incorporates the same functions as the one in the Expo tickets. Its minuteness, which will allow it to be embedded in ordinary sheets of paper, heralds an era in which almost anything can be discreetly tagged and read by a scanner that it need not touch."
May 8, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Michael Valentine Jones (5/8/2008)
So how long will it be before Homeland Security requires all air travelers to have an RFID in their ear?http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=rfid-power
"Now Hitachi, the maker of that chip, is aiming even smaller. Last year it announced a working version of a chip only 0.05 mm on a side and 0.005 mm thick. Almost invisible, this prototype has one sixty-fourth the area yet incorporates the same functions as the one in the Expo tickets. Its minuteness, which will allow it to be embedded in ordinary sheets of paper, heralds an era in which almost anything can be discreetly tagged and read by a scanner that it need not touch."
Dunno about the ear, but in your passport for sure....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/15/AR2006091500923.html
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
May 8, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Steve,
Most of the discussion was about the product you mentioned but little on the size of some of the tables we will be seeing in the near future. We can not think that we will be able to run today's tools against tomorrow's data collections, we will be growing and the tools need to grow with us.
Good article Steve, you do a good job.
Miles...
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
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