At this point in time I am interning for a printed circuit board firm which has tasked me with implementing an RFID system in order to verify that printed circuit boards are spending an appropriate time in each of the chemical baths down a particular surface finish line.
I have a few questions on the implementation itself and how arduino may be used to help?
-In looking through the various systems, I've found that some units come with 4 ports/4 antennas, does this mean I would only need 5 readers to monitor a 19-bath line? Or would I still need 19 readers?
-Am I correct in assuming that I need active tags for this implementation? Considering I need it to actively time each PCB in every chemical bath down the line, and is there a way to create logs for all of this?
-Do you see any way I could use arduino in this project?
ANY suggestions would be extremely helpful, I really appreciate your time.
've found that some units come with 4 ports/4 antennas
A link to such a device would be necessary in order to answer your questions.
Having multiple RFID readers, no matter how many ports/antennas, connected to one Arduino is going to prove a challenge.
How will the scanning of an RFID tag relate to how long a board has been in the tank? Someone could scan a tag and lay to board aside for 10 minutes, fouling up your system, rendering it mostly useless.
PaulS:
A link to such a device would be necessary in order to answer your questions.
Having multiple RFID readers, no matter how many ports/antennas, connected to one Arduino is going to prove a challenge.
How will the scanning of an RFID tag relate to how long a board has been in the tank? Someone could scan a tag and lay to board aside for 10 minutes, fouling up your system, rendering it mostly useless.
The only limit is your imagination (and budget).
Hi Paul,
I really appreciate your reply. Before anything I want to establish my budget is essentially limitless as this is a multi-billion dollar corporation and disparities on the order of thousands of dollars are pretty insignificant to them.
The system I am looking at implementing would not be a manual scanning based system. I will use fixed readers with active tags so that there is continuous interaction between the readers and the tags. And I want to know what the best way to basically use that interaction as a stopwatch would be.
The whole goal is for management to be able to hold the chemical bath workers accountable and verify that boards spent the correct amount of time in each sequential bath. They wouldn't be able to remove the board until it has gone through each bath in sequence.
If not arduino, is there a system better suited for this purpose?
I hope all of this helps. Thank you for your input