Feasibility of running Impinj R420 RFID reader middleware on Arduino

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi there,

I'm in the midst of a project involving RFID tag tracking using an Impinj R420 reader (https://support.impinj.com/hc/en-us/articles/202755298-Reader-Documentation). I've been interfacing with the reader using my laptop and an ethernet cable, but I would like to adapt my software to run on a tablet wirelessly. That presents the problem of wirelessly communicating with a reader that does not have that capability. Ideally it would use Bluetooth since the tablet will never be far from the reader but WiFi would work as well.

My question is, would an Arduino be the right tool for this? My theoretical design is an Arduino connected via ethernet cable to the reader, running the control (middleware) software that tells the reader when to read and for how long, and sending the reported tag information via Bluetooth or WiFi to the tablet where the rest of the software will run, in a Reader->Arduino->Tablet pipeline. The reader API's are in C# or Java, but since the tablet will be running Android, I'd like to stick with Java if possible.

I know that you can't run Java programs directly on the Arduino (right?) but I was wondering if there's any other way to use it as a relay between the tablet and the reader. If not, I would definitely appreciate any insight on the right tool for the job. Maybe RPi?

Thanks in advance,
Eric

2

How does the R420 communicate with the rest of the world?

All I can find information about on their website are devices that clearly show an ethernet port - if that's what you've got, why not connect it to your network (via wire) and then you can communicate with it over the wifi?

If it's got a different interface, you're gonna have to do more legwork than that for us, because information specific to that reader doesn't seem to be available in any obvious locations.