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Please scan my towel

jerrygamblin.com

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: Please scan my towel

#73
post #12

RFID is one of those things that seem cool until you start playing with it and then it turns out that the only uses for it are really boring. Like, you can't use it to locate stuff because the range is too short; you can't rely on stuff to have chips (food, or clothes or whatever) and it's a major time sink if you'd have to start tagging stuff yourself; it's cumbersome to install readers everywhere and not being able…

Walmart uses RFID to track inventory. http://www.usanfranonline.com/resources/supply-chain-managem...

Re: Please scan my towel

#76
post #12

RFID is one of those things that seem cool until you start playing with it and then it turns out that the only uses for it are really boring. Like, you can't use it to locate stuff because the range is too short; you can't rely on stuff to have chips (food, or clothes or whatever) and it's a major time sink if you'd have to start tagging stuff yourself; it's cumbersome to install readers everywhere and not being able…

What I want is RFID tags on all of my pieces of kit for when I go kayaking. Before I leave the house I scan my bag and see if I have missed anything. I was going to write a phone app to do it when I got a phone that had NFC, then I read up and found out the range was way too short.

Re: Please scan my towel

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently was at a Panera Bread, and when I put my Android phone (with NFC) onto the table, it immediately helpfully popped open tagwriter. Turns out they didnt lock the tables' tags, so you could write urls and when people placed their phones down, had those urls open. (they used the tags for their food pager system)

The ones at the Panera I used to work at weren't writable (I know this because I saw people trying more than once). How long ago was this?

A couple of weeks ago. It did take some work, it seems like there's a "sweet spot" that I had to hit, and some experimentation that required rotating the phone on the surface, but I was able to write google.com and then pop it open on my tablet.

Re: Please scan my towel

#79
post #73
post #12

RFID is one of those things that seem cool until you start playing with it and then it turns out that the only uses for it are really boring. Like, you can't use it to locate stuff because the range is too short; you can't rely on stuff to have chips (food, or clothes or whatever) and it's a major time sink if you'd have to start tagging stuff yourself; it's cumbersome to install readers everywhere and not being able…

Walmart uses RFID to track inventory. http://www.usanfranonline.com/resources/supply-chain-managem...

Sure, there are plenty of actual uses for RFID, what I meant is that most of the 'that'd be cool to play with' uses are impossible, and what is possible aren't the things you'd play with (I mean I don't have a warehouse, and for tracking stuff in my pantry it's impractical because of the reasons I mentioned earlier).
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