[Xastir] An idea rfid > APRS?

[Craig Anderson]

Hi Dave,
	I guess what your suggesting is a gateway between
RFID and APRS, where RFID information gets injected into
the APRS world.  You'd need an RFID scanner that would
take all the tags it sees and make an APRS object out of each.
Though each object is going to have your current location
because your RFID scanner may not have any directionality
to it's sensing.  This would not be far off the mark because
RFID doesn't have much range either.

Imagine you're driving down the road and your RFID scanner
is seeing lots of tags, which it then turns into objects and
transmits them, and continues to transmit them after you've
gone by.  The RFID object may be moving also, so these
RFID-created objects should have a very short time-to-live.
I have heard that any given APRS channel (bounded by
some definition of "local area") is good for about 60 to 100
APRS stations and objects, beyond which it starts to collapse.
In an area full of RFID's (like driving too close by the front of
a store or driving by a delivery truck full of RFID objects) you
could very quickly fill up the channel with very inane
RFID-created objects.  Then we start talking about RFID object
classifications and filtering and... and....  Lots of interesting
corner cases there.

The interesting thing I see in this idea is that you are creeping
up on the idea of remote sensing.  A existing case of this is a
weather station connected to an APRS station.  I think this is
*very* interesting but we will need a lot more bandwidth before
we do very much remote sensing.  1200 baud is not functional
for where we are likely to go with this.

Craig

On Feb 27, 2008, at 2:24 AM, Dave H wrote:

> A bit of thinking..
>
> This may belong in an APRS listserv but I was thinking how Xastir  
> could be
> expanded and noticed a Linux RFID project on Sourcefoge  - This made  
> me
> wonder if we could localise situation data by linking up rfid  
> devices  to
> aprs by some box that translated rfid data to aprs compatible  
> protocol.
>
> Here is the example I thought of. In an emergency certain vehicles,  
> devices
> or hardware could have rfid  devices stuck on them and an emergency
> controller could know what is where via aprs and in a changing  
> situation ask
> for things to be moved as per necessary.
>
> I maybe well out - I'm no developer though but though it worth  
> mentioning
> for discussion rather than forget it.
>
> Dave
> G0CER
> G6VSG used on Echolink and APRS sometimes
> http://www.eQSL.cc/Member.cfm?G0CER
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