“If a farmer wants to count animals through a four-metre-wide gateway, two or more will be going through at once and that could result in shielding of signals or even double-counting of some tags. The situation is worse than that of trying to get all the goods on a pallet read as they enter a warehouse, McKenzie says. “The boxes on a pallet don’t move about all the time.” Animals contain water and blood, are covered with hair and may have horns, some of the most troublesome of radio-shielding substances. Deer particularly like to travel in bunches. The movement means the software relied on to prevent signal collisions with stationary or predictably moving goods does not work so well. Some trials have been done of the alternative RFID carrier, the bolus – a hollow pill that sits in the animal’s intestine; but that is less useful for meat processing, since the internal organs are extracted and the bolus must be “recovered”. You always know where the eartags are – on the animal’s head, Mackenzie says.”
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“Final pieces are being put in place for NFC technology to enable contactless point of sale transactions. The best way to look at NFC, Michielsen says, is as a step forward in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. “NFC is RFID,” he says. “The chips used in cellular handsets for NFC technology act as both a transponder and a reader. It can be accessed from a reader, like a point of sale terminal – and then the phone itself can also act as a reader and access smart objects like smart posters or smart advertising.” Given RFID News’ sister publication covers contactactless transaction technology, editors believe there is a (semantic) distinction between RFID and NFC, especially if NFC entails pushing information beyond a basic identification code. “ The State of Florida will soon begin using RFID transponders currently in the cars of some Floridians for automatic toll collections to monitor commute times and traffic patterns with an eye towards improving the road system and providing accurate trip time information. And the state has tapped a Canadian-based company (with offices in the U.S.) to help with this project. “Before considering the issues raised by this technology, it is helpful to understand the basics of its operation. An RFID system is composed of readers and tags. Readers generate signals that are dual purpose: they provide power for a tag, and they create an interrogation signal. A tag captures the energy it receives from a reader to supply its own power and then executes commands sent by the reader. The simplest command results in the tag sending back a signal containing a unique digital ID (e.g., the EPC-96 standard uses 96 bits) that can be looked up in a database available to the reader to determine its identity, perhaps expressed as a name, manufacturer, SKU (stock keeping unit) number, and cost.” Via /., a technical primer on RFID. “Now, librarians at the Vatican Library are using cutting-edge technology to keep track of the priceless ancient collection. About 30,000 books have been tagged with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips since implementation of the technology began last year. Two million of the 40-million piece collection will be tagged in the near future, allowing staff to complete the library’s annual inventory in less than a day, something that previously forced it to close for a whole month.” |
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