I am new to arduino and I have been working on a project that should be able to track RFID items. My goal is to make an Arduino-based system that can track items and display the location of the goods that is attached to RFID tag. The Arduino would have to track those items, display the availability in each respective state on either an LCD or a TFT, and also be able to accept user input as to which state an item should be considered ("available" or "not available"). The tags should be as small as possible. To put that in context, I want to do a system that can track a single piece of paper in a stack of papers. To find a specific paper one by one is time-consuming and inefficient. I would like to have an Arduino-based RFID reader that could read tags that I would place on all the papers. Then, I would only have to look at a screen to check that whether the paper that I want is in the room or not.
Can an Arduino read an RFID tag reliably?
How would I go about tracking a paper by using RFID tag?
Is this project possible? Was there any successful project on this topic that I can refer to now?
Best RFID perf you could get with an Arduino is about a 10cm range. If you're RFID Tag is too far you can't detect it anymore. If it is on top of all the paper it could work, but the RFID system is a little bit tricky whenever it came to detect one specific tag if it is not alone in the range of the detector. In fact it's the RFID detector chip that "choose" a tag to read I think. So for exemple, if you have 2 RFID tag close enough, you will see randomly one or the other. It could be OK if you wait enough time and if you check every time the returned ID has changed and store every different ID you get. But statisticly, this time could be very long I think.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I experienced this kind of things when I tried RFID myself.
There are many kinds of RFID. The basic three are LF, HF, and UHF. 125/134kHz, 13.56MHz, and 928MHz (actually a range around 928MHz). The range goes up as the frequency goes up.
Dumb tags are not going to work with several tags in range. You'll need a system designed to work with several tags in range at once. I'm not sure that any of the systems designed to work with the Arduino will do that.
Anyway, it is called collision avoidance.
Are you just wanting an RFID system at the door to log when a paper enters and leaves the room? Or a system that will query every single RFID tag in the room to see if it is within range? The first, you'll need some way to tell if a tag is in the doorway, is it entering or leaving. The second, that could take a very long time and be quite complex with a lot of tags.
polymorph:
Or a system that will query every single RFID tag in the room to see if it is within range? The second, that could take a very long time and be quite complex with a lot of tags.
Thats how i understood it.
Range can also be improved by using expensive active tags also.
This is the dream of logistics companies such as DHL who spend millions trying to develop a system such as described.
I have seen a hand held device working on the 928 frequenct that can interrogate multiple tags but range was limited to a couplof metres, useful for short range inventory checking.