Slashgeo

Using RFID Tags Around the House?

posted by Satri on Tuesday May 20, @03:29PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the know-where-your-underwear-hides dept.

Slashdot runs a discussion on using RFID to locate things around the house. Their summary: "I have a larger family and various items in the house (some tools, some pieces of clothing) 'travel' unexpectedly. We joke about gremlins doing that, but it's tiring never to be sure that I'll find an object where I left it two days ago. For the sheer hacking fun of it, I'm thinking of sticking RFID tags on some and trying to triangulate a position with several tranceivers placed in the house. Has anyone have any suggestions for this amateur 'Google Home'? Thanks." See also our RFID section.

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• Retail and DIY

  (Score:2, Informative)

  by AronRubin (1621) on Tuesday May 20, @05:23PM (#2522)

  I don't know much here I just remember feed items as they zoom past me so you are disclaimed.

  • Retail:
    • http://www.loc8tor.com [loc8tor.com]
  • DIY:
    • http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/11/rfid_poke r_table.html [makezine.com]
    • http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/03/create_a_ wearable_rfid_re.html [makezine.com]

  [ Reply to This ]
• Range issues

  (Score:2, Insightful)

  by daedlus (1494) on Wednesday May 21, @09:33AM (#2552)

  From what little I understand of RFID it would be very hard to get a detector that would be sensitive enough to detect tags over any meaningful (larger than a couple metres) distance. And by very hard I mean very expensive. The frequency on these tags is very high, on purpose. That way data can be exchanged with relatively little noise. The trade-off is that high frequency signals have little to no range. To fix this it might be possible to create a sort of crippled RFID tag that operates at a lower frequency, making it much easier to detect over distances, but that would be a heck of a lot of work when there are commercial products that work very well using radio waves. Moreover, the detectors would be expensive anyway, and you would need at least three to triangulate a position and four to get an elevation measurement, making this cool little project prohibitively expensive.

  [ Reply to This ]
  • Re:Range issues by Anonymous Voxel (Score:0) Thursday June 12, @04:38PM