High Frequency RFID - Score Control and Logic

Projects General Guidance
1

I am making various games and one of the functions I would like to do is to track different score items one player vs another.

Example: 4 cars in a race around a track.

Each car is noted as red,blue,green,yellow

Color change LED and score logic will track the number of times they have completed the circuit.

The issue I have not worked out is how to "capture" that they crossed the finish line (or in other games crossed a designated spot).

I was exploring high speed RFID readers which can read 100s of RFID per second. But my knowledge of this whole space is very limited and hoping others can provide ideas or other means to do this.

Current materials in consideration

Issues/Concerns:

  1. Reader needs to only read 2-10 devices(cars) and only at most 1-2 within 1/4 second frame. But can this reader, or .. any do this with arduino?
  2. The cars / devices are tiny 76:1 scale. Can this or another reader read these RFIDs and that fast?
  3. RFID reader needs to only read "when crossing line", but this by necessity would read any RFID within an area. Could I "beam form" with metal or other such shielding to only read a space 3" x 1"? or maybe even 1" square?

I am hoping others have worked on projects like this and have ideas on how to "read" and score something within speed of game.

2

Other technologies are magnetic, light beam with light beam being the best in terms of speed and can't fail, magnets can be fooled if the cars have ferrous metal and or unshielded motors etc.
I am assuming a slot car arrangement so the cars are in known spots on the track.

3

Even “fast” RFID readers struggle with very fast passes, especially with 13.56 MHz (HF) or 125 kHz (LF) tags that aren’t optimized for fast, high-speed transit reads.

4

Seems Someone a few years back worked on this. RFID for lap time (micro RC cars) I will follow up on that thread and see how things worked out

5

the cars are not in tracks. so the simple things of braking light barrier will not work.

The other thread went down path like I was of RFID but that readers were too slow.

Suggestion was to read bar code / pattern stripe to indicate one car from another

It would only have to represent two bits: that would give me up to four cars so it could be "crude"

Does anyone have experience with this?

What are my size of code limitation?

How fast can this kind of scanner read

Can the scanner cover different widths say: one "spot" 1"x1" vs a line of 1" x 4"