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Hi all, I am looking for someone who may know of a company who already does or perhaps could make a system of detection via closed curciut i guess? Having a bar (metal) detect what is touching it via rfid or some sort chip...
well this will be for inventory control really. I didnt nessecarily want to give the idea away as it is still patent pending, but we hang lots of things.
On the hangers there will be an RFID type chip that interacts with the pole or arm that has an electrical current and will detect what is touching it. Make a little more sense? If not i can probably whip something up here soon, my computer litterally blew up not but a week ago and asus still has it so i havnt been able to make much headway since.
RFID has very limited range. Could you simply put the RFID sensor on the bar, and when the tag comes near it, it detects it? The sensor coil can be made smaller than what it on the commercially available units to limit the range even more, so if there are several hangers with tags close together, only the one directly in the field will be detected.
Also, the tag and sensor have a certain preference for orientation. It detects on-axis orientation much better than when the coil on the sensor is tilted at an angle. If the hangers are swinging around a turn, there might be enough angular separation to pick out individual tags.
Get an RFID tag kit (I've got one from Phidget) and experiment. They are reasonably cheap, plug right into your PC, and come with several different kinds of tags.
well it will actually be on contact, not just near it, think of a clothing hanger on a closet bar... same idea except on the under side of the hook there will be a small contact that contains information about the product that is on it (the hanger). I dont want to make this my self as it is going to be a huuuge project and i am wondering if anyone knows of a company that might be willing to do this or already has something similar to this.
Sounds more like a job for a Dallas "one wire" interface than RFID. You actually still need 2 wires, but the bar could have two lengthwise contacts near the top such that the hanger bridges them. You can have multiple devices and unique ID codes with this arrangement. Dallas Semiconductor would be the one to talk to for a "huuuge" project.
If you want position information off the hanger, that's another thing. Perhaps one of the contacts is broken into segments, every foot or so, and a micro reads the segments and can determine the position of the inventory to the nearest foot, light a light over it, then a person goes to the section with the light and manually figures out which of the items in that foot-long section is the one required. Something like that?
almost spot on, but i will have to look into this dallas one wire deal. Thanks for the information all!
and yes it will be positional, and will in the end render a 3d version of the wall according the the planogram or what ever the person using the system uses.
so, i have looked into the "One wire" deal and am now wondering, does that have the capabiity to detect more than one thing or would it stop where it detects the first connection made
_______\|/_\|/_\|/______
________/__/___/_______)
the slash marks would be the "hangers on the pole, each one with a different ID and what not (the \|/ would be the animation of electricity inttereacting with each). I noticed before i would have to have a microchip that would be every so often to detect multiple objects. I guess what im trying to figure out is this. Back before the Iphone most touchscreens were a single point touch, you would press with both hands and which ever one was touched first was the "controlling" finger. Now with Iphones you have multi touch, similar philosophy. I am looking for a connection that can detect multiple contacts, not just stop at the first thing that is touching it and then return the signal to the main server/what ever. I am looking for something that will be able to go down a line and detect, okay at 1.2 feet this is touching me, at 1.6 feet, this is touching me and at 2 feet this is touching me, reached end of bar, sending data back...
Is it capable with out micro chips intterupting the signal or is that the only way? Even if the method was, "detected first object touching me sending data, detected object touching me, already sent data, continue on to next object" so on and so forth, this would be fine.
Sorry if this post was a bit legnthy but its hard to get your idea out when you dont know all the lingo and or what i should be using to be getting the results i want. thanks for bearing with me.
"Multidrop" is the term you are looking for. Yes, it can do multidrop - that's why I said you could have multiple devices.
Here'a quote from Dallas Semi about their DS2401 Silicon Serial Number (probably the chip you want) that uses the One Wire interface -
The DS2401 is fully reverse-compatible with the DS2400 but provides the additional multi-drop capability that enables many devices to reside on a single data line.
The way it works is the master sends out the ID codes and checks to see if it gets a response. There's a huge number of unique codes (7.2x10^16) but you only transmit the ones you know you have, and there's a way to put the hanger on a separate device to read just that code by itself immediately. So, in operation, the pole sends every code it knows, one after the other, and checks to see if it gets a response back.
I punched some numbers on the timing for you - if you were to check 250 device codes, it would take about a second, 15,000 device codes would take a about a minute, and if you were to check a million it would take a little over an hour.
You could speed that up by putting the hanger on the separate reader first before you put it on the pole. Then the pole could detect it almost immediately by just checking for that one number.
The devices use almost no power in standby mode, so even if you did have a huge number of items and just one reader, the power supply would not get out of hand.
duffy thank you so much for all of your input, the terms and what not will help lots when trying to explain. And there would be about 1 machine reading every 500-100 items and there would be multiple machines that all would feed that data to a main server that would combine that all into a database.
So now that we have the idea and what not resolved, anyone know of a company that might be capable of taking on this task of "Mass producing" it? and there will be a lot more than just the hanger and the bar it will be in a "slat wall" type design, which will run the current back to the main computer.
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thanks for bearing with me. 
