RFID tracking and positioning project

Originally posted by Nameless_87 Just wanted to ask... isn't there a way to buy the hardware ready instead of having to build it myself?

You can buy the a ready-made tracking system (hardware & software) through purelink.ca (the first link: http://www.purelink.ca/Product/Observer.aspx).

At this point I'd say you just have to figure out if you have the money to spend on buying a ready-made system or if you have to go the cheaper route and follow the instructions and build it yourself.

It should be no problem to deal with RSSI if you don't actually want to triangulate position and instead simply perform a "closest point" analysis like the guy who built his own did. All he did was place an "reader" in each room and simply compare all the RSSI signals to figure out which reader the tag was closest to and place the tag/person in that room. When they moved out of the room and into the hallway, the animation shows the person moving into the hall. There's no way for the system to figure out WHERE in the room the tag/person is, but that was not necessary for his application. Something tells me it won't be in yours either.

Yep, the tags are preprogrammed and the readers spit out tag IDs with RSSI data. Very simple. Read the blog post... it covers how the tags and readers work. All you will need to do is set up two or three readers, connect them to COM ports on the computer or use USB COM adapters, and there you go. As long as you can open COM ports and read data in C#, you should be good to go.

I'm sure there is a way around it, but you'll have to figure that one out yourself :) I'm simply suggesting an option for constructing a working demo, not a fleshed out product. In a real-world scenario, readers would be connected over their own communications network (whatever that may look like, i.e. wired, mesh, etc.) and communicate with a central control PC.