Today was the last day of the RFID course, which was the programming part – however I thought I’d just post a picture of the result of our labs on the previous two days.

The purpose of the lab was to give us an opportunity to try out techniques for doing a site survey, and to build a prototype design for an RFID solution, in this case to one of the most difficult tasks, parcel processing.

Whilst there is an awful lot of hype about RFID tags allowing people to find out what is in your fridge from the other side of the street, and grand visions of not having to unload your shopping trolley onto the checkout at the supermarket, the result is really quite different. RFID signals are pretty susceptible to a wide range of hazards such as metal, liquids, and even a box of cables will result in a tag being unable to be read. However this means that alongside the problems of reading a shopping trolley full of groceries, reading tags on parcels when you don’t know what will be in the packages, and you don’t know which way up the box will be is a bit difficult. This is why we were given this as a practical problem. The solution has to be able, at relatively high speed, be able to read a tag on a box containing unknown contents, when the tag could be at any angle.

The solution also has to be practical in terms of cost – so you can’t just surround the conveyor belt with readers. We ended up using three readers, and then bouncing the signals around with aluminium foil (a real solution would use something like steel). This managed to read all of the example parcels wherever we placed the tags!