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Using RFID Tags Around the House?
Attacked-by-gremlins writes "I have a larger family and various items in the house (some tools, some pieces of clothing) 'travel' unexpectedly. We joke about gremlins doing that, but it's tiring never to be sure that I'll find an object where I left it two days ago. For the sheer hacking fun of it, I'm thinking of sticking RFID tags on some and trying to triangulate a position with several tranceivers placed in the house. Has anyone have any suggestions for this amateur 'Google Home'? Thanks."
Beats the heck out of everyone learning to be considerate of each others' property. What benefit would that have in real life? ~
Invenio via vel creo
There's some equipment out there with decent range, but it's usually quite expensive. My $50 do-it-all tranciever has a range of about 6 inches. With the lower frequency tags you get better range, but still I don't think I've seen trancievers with anywhere-in-the-house type range.
FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
Really. Most sub $100 readers have a range that can be measured in millimeters. To get something with about 3' or 4' of range for a single reader will cost four figures. I've done some fairly extensive testing with these readers, and it is possible to boost the range by adding external antennas (for more money). So I guess what I am saying is that what you are planning on doing is technically possible, but is not feasible for most peoples' "tinkering" budgets.
I don't know what your budget is like, but the readers can be pricey. The ones we use that are able to triangulate (2-D with two readers, 3-D with 3 readers) ran about $4k apiece. But, they would easily cover a standard sized home.
Of course, we had different needs than you, so there are probably considerably cheaper alternatives.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Now, where dd I put that RFID scanner?
Buy two hammers separately. Make sure they are identical. Make sure you also have two receipts.
Next time someone misplaces your stuff, use one hammer to break their hand. If the skin breaks and blood gets on the hammer, throw it in your neighbor's yard and find a way to plant the receipt over there.
When the police come to find you, explain that you found your spouse, kid, dog, whatever in a crazed state with broken fingers. They must be hallucinating because they are blaming you. Hey, look at that! Maybe your neighbor just went inside, and, oh my god, there's a bloody hammer right next to his birdbath! Well, case closed, officer.
You'll never have anything misplaced again.
http://www.loc8tor.com/
My Journal
Have a garage sale, and get rid of everything you don't need.
If you're losing items in messy closets or bedrooms, then you probably need to clean up the clutter. That or you own way too many valuable possessions that may be stolen or permanently lost. Live simple.
I live in a small, energy-efficient home. I own exactly what I need and no more. I have a computer, a desk, a chair, books, an acoustic guitar, a bike, and a couch. And that's about it.
All of my cookware and utensils stay in the kitchen and never leave. Cleaning supplies stay in a closet. My toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.
I never lose a thing. Ever.
Instead of trying to triangulate a position, you might be able to put a receivers on doorways, and log to a network each RFID signal received. This way when you look up your hammer, you can tell which doorway it last passed.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Try UHF(ISM band 903-928 MHz) RFID Readers; they have better range than HF readers (13 MHz). Intel sells a single chip (R1000) demo kit you can take and hack. You may have difficulty with large metallic objects due to reflection. Also, stuff with high water (H2O) content may absorb too much power to reflect back. With UHF, you may expect 5+ meters (20 feet) under ideal condition. The tags may be expensive in small quantity. Try to "borrow" from a larger lot. Obviously, you have to get UHF tags for UHF readers; I am not aware of multimode readers/tags.
It seems most people here don't seem to understand active rfid vs. passive rfid.
Passive:
pro - Tags are extremely small, readers are cheap, tags are cheap
con - Range, non-existant
Active:
pro - Range
con - expensive tags, tags are large, tags are battery powered
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
It seems like only one hammer is needed for you scenario.
So, what's the second hammer for? A redundant array of independent hammers?
--
As others have mentioned the range for passive RFID detection is painfully short - to do what OP wants he needs active tags and readers.
A passive RFID tag is powered by the reader - hence its short range. An active tag carries its own power supply - like the toll booth speedpass tags.
Active tags run from about the size of a dime to about the size of a paperback book - in my job I deal with the paperback book-sized tags.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Our obsession with making everything small leads directly to this problem. Smaller things get lost more easily.
They sell those giant-sized remote controls at Walgreens or your local random-crap-mart. Buy one, you'll never lose it again. It can't fall between the cushions of the couch because it's friggin huge. If the thing you don't want to lose doesn't come in giant-size, permanently attach it to something which is too large to lose but still portable. Gas stations have learned this lesson, that's why the bathroom key is attached to a huge plank.
To make it even easier, paint it something bright and garish.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Why not have a portable reader that you can carry around with you. When you enter the room, you can get a printout of all the stuff in the room. If the printout does not correspond with your organizational directives--that's what kids are for!
For this to be really useful, I think you need an RFID tag on every item in the home. First, construct a new home with a single entry point (you can add emergency exits for fire safety.) The front entry room will contain a computer and an RFID tagging device. Every single object that comes through the door gets tagged, named, photographed, and described in the computer system before it is allowed into the house.
It's a little work upfront, but think of the advantages. No time wasted organizing your possessions. No time wasted "tidying up." Nothing can ever be out of place, because nothing BELONGS anywhere. The mixing bowl might not be in the kitchen, but it's no trouble. Just search for it using any of the dozens of wall terminals installed around the house, and a series of flashing arrows will direct you right to your desired object.
Forget your house, try scanning your garage to see what RFIDs the feds see when you drive over wires buried in certain roads.
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TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders ALREADY!
Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.
Yup. My brother works on them (since 2001).
The us gov T.R.E.A.D. act (which passed) made it illegal to sell new passenger cars lacking untamperable RFID in the tires allowing efficient scanning of moving cars.
Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.
Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.
Taggant chemical research papers
 http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF
(remove spaces in url from slashcode if needed)
The chips in your tires are for forensic "after the fact" database tracking, from databases collected on highway choke points, It can be done in real time too though.
I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].
It is allegedly for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.
A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFID chips embedded in the tire).
The governement can then either look back in databases to see wheere and when your car drove, and OCR liscense plates at tool or Customs can
build the database up even better without the feds needing to visit your home to get your RFID GUIDs.
More sinister, it is near impossible to buy tires without the vendor in the USA filling out federal paperwork of what VIN the recipient car is!
Photos of tracking chips before molded deep into tires!
http://www.sokymat.com/index.php?id=94
PLEASE LOOK AT THAT LINK : Its the same shocking tire material I have been trying to tell people about since the spring of 2001 on slashdot.
a controversial dead older link was at http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html
(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it insertes usually into any of my urls to get to the shocking info and photos on the enbedded LOGI 160 chips that the us gov scans when you cross mexican and canadian borders.)
You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is very secret.
Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.
The photo of the secret high speed overpass prototype WAS at
http://www.tadiran-telematic
My current employer (i.e. disclaimer - I work for 'em) has stuff that does this -- it's definitely not cheap though. Uses active RFID tags and wireless access points to do the triangulation stuff.
I don't think it's just problem with kids misplacing stuff. It also happens to adults for a lot of reasons, such as problems with memory, being interrupted while working on a project, getting over tired or just being plain lazy in not putting stuff back.
Either way, it doesn't seem far fetched that there could be a very good market for a product that could do this relatively cheap. So there you go, forget about the home tinkering and start thinking about a new business if you can find a way to make it cheap enough.
Whatever you do, *DON'T* put RFID tags on your socks.
They're missing for a reason. If you find them, a paradoxical black hole will open up in your dryer and engulf the entire planet. Trust me, I've done the math.
For the love of god... not the socks.
Probably not RFID. I haven't seen much of anything that offers a signal strength measurement with enough granularity. In addition, signal strength is dependent on what direction the antenna(on the tag) is facing.
I don't know of anything out there commercially available with a precise enough clock to manage it time based.
You can get up to about 10 feet with certain UHF tags and receivers, but that is really pushing FCC limitation on signal power. RFID tags really just aren't locators, regardless of how much we want them to be.
So it's too expensive to buy the readers to do triangulation. But you could buy the cheap readers and put them on doorways to trace things as they pass by. Then you can track what room an object was last seen in. That is probably sufficient for your purposes.
I use a product called Homeseer and alot of people are already doing this. There are two types of tags people are using, iAutomate tags and cheaperRFID tags. The iAutomate tags are more complex, and hence more expensive. I have the Cheaper RFID tags. I have one in our laptops bags-- if no laptops are present-- no wifi. I don't believe they do triangulation. The iAutomate ones do- but are far more expensive-- at least when I last looked.
"I'm thinking of sticking RFID tags on some and trying to triangulate a position with several tranceivers placed in the house. (Does) anyone have any suggestions(?)"
When you have people over for a dinner party, turn off the speaker that says "PLEASE RETURN TO THE STORE!"
Three Squirrels
> Your problem is a human problem that CANNOT be solved by technology
Huh? My cordless phone at home is rarely in its cradle. But I can push the pager button, it beeps, and I found the phone. I'd say technology can help find misplaced items.
Or you could use technology to abuse your children (just kidding, kind of) until they bend to your will. That might work too.
So now we need to wrap tinfoil around our tires?
A lot of funny comments, but I see a real need for small passive RFID tags. My father is getting on in years and he loses/misplaces small things. Like his glasses, which is a small problem. Like his hearing aids; family members are currently looking for a hearing aid that has been missing for over a week. And, like his false teeth, which he no longer has, because he/we cannot afford to continue replacing them after the first couple of times. I don't really need to identify the item uniquely, I just want a beep or proximity detection.
Finally someone else thinks that life needs a "Ctrl+f" function.
What are you blabbering about? TECHNOLOGY IS FOR SOLVING HUMAN PROBLEMS. That's the whole point of technology!
I can't believe you got modded up as insightful.
Why not screw triangulation and just install enough readers around the house to locate it by which reader response?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Maybe buy a a bunch of cheaper receivers and put them on every door jamb in the house. At least then you'll have a "last seen in this room" style locator.
"human problems cannot be fixed
Humanity, in general, is always going to have problems. No matter how perfect someone thinks they are, they are eventually going to misplace the phone, their keys, or are going to slam on the brakes in their car. Nothing you can do to stop that.
So, with that in mind, why not use technology to solve the effects of the problem?
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
when i push the button on the base, the handset does (usualy) beep, but the base beeps a whole heck of a lot louder. who the @$%# designed this monstrosity?!
d'ya really think i need help finding the base RIGHT AFTER I PUSHED A BUTTON ON IT?
Once upon a time, I too was single. When I put things down, they remained there until I picked them up again.
Then I got married, and the sudden Alzheimer's onset began. Things... Things began to move. It began small, tv remotes, car keys and the like. Soon it extended out to clothing, kitchen appliances. And then things began to just -- I'M NOT CRAZY DAMMIT! STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT! -- things began to DISAPPEAR. Treasured old jeans, t-shirts I'd had since high school, important tax receipts from 1992, they all began to just go away with no explanation.
Then the poltergeists came, and my wife insisted on calling them children. I fiercely hold my TV remote in my hand, knowing that if I loosen my grip on it it will fly across the room. Change on the desktop, shiny hand tools, anything that beeps, whistles or lights up, DVDs of any stripe, anything less than 60 lbs of dead weight can fly away in a heartbeat.
But I'm safe now, here in my closet. I got my favorite Leatherman, my surefire flashlight, my solid brass Zippo lighter and MY TV REMOTE DAMMIT and I am NOT LETTING GO OF THEM! NOT LETTING GO!
And I am not opening the door. They're MINE, YA HEAR ME? MINE!!!!!!
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
packrat infestation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_rat
Pack rats are prevalent in the deserts and highlands of western United States and northern Mexico. They also occur in parts of the eastern United States and Western Canada. Pack rats are a little smaller than a typical rat and have long, sometimes bushy tails.
Pack rats build complex nests of twigs, called "middens", often incorporating cactus. Nests are often built in small caves, but frequently also in the attics and walls of houses. Some Neotoma species, such as the White-throated Woodrat (N. albigula), use the base of a prickly pear or cholla cactus as the site for their home, utilizing the cactus' spines for protection from predators. Others, like the Desert Woodrat (N. lepida) will appropriate the burrows of ground squirrels or kangaroo rats and fortify the entrance with sticks and bits of spiny cactus stems fallen from Jumping and Teddy-bear Chollas.
In houses, pack rats are active nocturnally, searching for food and nest material. A peculiar characteristic is that if they find something they want, they will drop what they are currently carrying, for example a piece of cactus, and "trade" it for the new item. They are particularly fond of shiny objects, leading to tales of rats swapping jewelry for a stone.
What the hell kind of comment is that to make on Slashdot? Most people here LIVE to throw technology at a problem...
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
Keep an eye on e-bay. Suggest you get some of the early RFID readers that are out there. Matrics/Symbol/Motorola AR400 is a start.
.02 seconds. The hardiest of tags will survive mild washing, freezing etc.
You'll need antennas, 900Mhz 6dBi gain are the most popular.
Using the AR reader you can put it into autonomous mode (it will read tags all by itself). A quick web based application cat hit the readers on occassion to see which antenna picked up a particular tag last.
Now, tag everything - old tax returns, TV remote etc. Perhaps car keys.
Be aware that RF has limitations. Dropping your keys in a fish tank will normally obscure the RFID - however, you should be able to tell which room it is in (where it was seen last).
Next, add tags to all the people (and dogs) in the house. Now, when the keys were last scene in the living room, you can correlate that with who was in the living room at that time - and even later.
The RFID readers are limited to 1Watt (30dBm) in the US by FCC, so you really want to pay attention to cables. I'm not sure what antennas go for, but you can make reasonable antannas yourself. On a reader like the AR400, you want to make a RHCP for transmit and a LHCP for receive (gives nice isolation) or vice versa.
Love to here how it turns out.
BTW, microwave ovens will kill tags in about
Some tags, if unprotected, will temporarily fail under intense incondensable lights. Turn off light and they will work again. Special tags will work well on metal (spaced off the metal by 1/8" or so). Yet other special tags will under water... Some of the biggest tags can be read at 40+ feet. The small ones, say 1"x1" are only good for a few inches. Size matters.
Class 0 has some performance advantages, but no one is making them anymore - maybe you can get some used ones cheap. The AR400 reader can read them as well.
BTW, if you have 900Mhz wireless phones (or other devices) in the house, forget it.
Look for "gen 2" (Specifically EPC Class 1 Generation 2) equipment.
There are some things where throwing technology is fun. A lot of fun. And there are other things where people should just learn to understand the root cause and fix the issue at heart. A new fancy alarm isn't going to magically make you punctual. Learning to be punctual is going to make you punctual.
Likewise, using technology isn't going to make finding things better. If anything, it encourages bad habits (i.e. not being organized) and makes it harder down the line when you may not always have the said technology at your disposal. You wanting to find things and being organized about it is going to make finding things better. Technology or not.
I'm all for using technology in new and innovative ways. But that doesn't necessarily mean that when I see bad habits, I don't call them out as such. You can use technology to solve the symptoms, but the cause will still remain (and if anything, get worse over time).
He's free to do as he pleases. However, I'd still say that being well organized is a great trait to have, and one that will definitely show through in just about everything else that you do in life.
Nevermind behind the couch, have you ever taken the room apart looking for the damn thing, only to find later that it's being sitting "right there" the whole bloody time?
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?