Has anyone figured out a way to integrate UHF RFID scanners easily?
I’ve recently had a chance to play around with some 860-960MHz UHF RFID tags and it seems like they’re nearly as impressive as iBeacons are with BLE proxies…but the UHF RFID tags don’t need batteries. Possibly a great way to design something for tracking what room (or part of a room) things are in easily by simply affixing passive sticker/button to stuff and never have to think about it again?
No doubts, but the range is completely different, so like apples vs oranges.
What do you mean “completely different”?
The BLE iBeacons seem to drop off around 30-40ft. The UHF RFID tags (at least with the Zebra/Android phone handheld reader I have) seem to drop off around 20-30ft. That seems quite similar?
You may be thinking of HF RFID (like door access cards) that are only a few inches. I’m talking about the UHF ones that are typically used for commercial inventory - like tracking what’s in which shipping container without having to get at every individual box on every individual pallet, or having sensors on a ceiling of a warehouse that tracks what’s on each row of shelves in real-time without having to touch each individual shelf nor box.
You are right, in your specific case and hardware they might have comparable range.
I didn’t think of HF RFID, but just UHF RFID vs BLE generally. Ble can extend enormously, but in a house polluted by 2.4GHz noise some ultra low power iBeacon could have even shorter range than UHF RFID.
What scanner hardware you were thinking of?
2.4GHz is RF-soup for sure…I’ve given up on it for most things. Zigbee is awful unreliable, 2.4GHz WiFi is brutally slow, Bluetooth is noisy. I did finally get a spectrum analyzer one place I rented to try and debug WiFi but the noise floor on 2.4GHz was basically the ceiling of the spectrum analyzer. And there’s SO much other stuff out there all on 2.4GHz too from phones and baby monitors to cameras and microwave ovens.
What scanner hardware you were thinking of?
That’s the part I’m really hoping someone else has figured out. I know there’s a lot of stuff out there from previous-generations of surplus commercial gear that is “obsolete” or “slow” by modern commercial standards but still can do a spectacular job.
The ones I’ve played with so far are a handheld Zebra RFID RFD8500 and a Flipper Zero addon…the Flipper addon is very short range (maybe a foot) but the Zebra gun can read stuff thru the floor of my house from across the house most of the time.
My hope is someone else has already looked into this and knows a super-easy way to integrate something readily available.
Esp32 (wroom32) could talk with Zebra via serial bluetooth.
But aren’t those handheld scanners quite directional?
Did you have a look what Hopeland offers?
I don’t think Zebra is using serial, when I pair it to bluetooth on my computer it immediately un-pairs…when I pair it to my phone it shows only as an input device without their app and then works with “their app”. USB it shows as a HID device. I don’t see signs of it using serial port profile.
Yes, they are quite directional - which is why I think they’d be very good for sensing locations within a house or around it. You’d easily be able to have opposing pointed antennas and differentiate where something is based on which antennas it can be seen by.
I’ll have to look at the other one mentioned.