If this is in the wrong section, I apologize.
So I'm working on a preliminary sort of bike-share system. In order for this to work, we must be able to scan a bike as it goes into a docking station to know which of the many bikes is going into the dock. We are currently using an RFID system; however, there are slight problems with the tag and reader being around metal.
The bike frame is made out of aluminum and this is where the tag will be mounted. The reader is inside a steel docking station with a large square hole cut out of it for the reader to be mounted into. I suppose I should also mention that the reader we are using is from sparkfun; the following two items:
The tag we are using is a standard 125khz tag. The system works wonderfully when the tag is not on the aluminum bike frame; however, once mounted, the aluminum cuts out all of the signal and it's impossible for the reader to read the tag at all, no matter how close they get.
My dilemma is the following: we can encase the 125khz RFID tag in a fair amount of plastic to extend it further away from the aluminum frame so that the reader can actually read it, but this doesn't really feel like a very elegant solution. The alternative is to get a metal-mount RFID tag, i.e. something like this:
The problem with this is that a) it's expensive, and b) it's in the 900Mhz range, thus requiring us to a buy a new reader. I haven't been able to find a reader in that range that isn't crazily expensive ($300 or more) or shown on a semi-sketchy Asian website in which the minimum number of parts you can order is around 1,000.
Am I missing something? Is there a cheaper way to do metal mount RFID? And if not, is there a better solution than simply encasing the tag we have in plastic? How do other bikeshare systems handle this?
Any guidance with these questions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much for your time.
