2018-07-05 (Th) UHFImplant

Relays one through four were all tested by energizing outputs on the Arduino. This was a simple implementation of setting pins in the setup() portion of the code. It turned out that the relay board used sinking inputs so the bits had to be set LOW in order to trigger the relay to pull in.

While running some tests, the Arduino was sometimes powered from the computer's USB port and sometimes it was powered by a battery connected to auxiliary power terminals. When the power was coming through Arduino's USB port, it led to wavering fan operation and the screen was nearly unreadable due to low contrast. When it was powered from a battery, everything ran smoothly. This could have been caused by the onboard voltage regulator or possibly a current-limiting device.

Transmission power was boosted from the minimum 5dBm to 15dBm and the increase in read range was substantial. Before, reading had to take place by nearly placing a tag on top of the antenna, but at a higher power, it could take place at the top or side of the enclosure. Later, the power was turned down to 10dBm since tags were still easy to read at that power level, which can also be seen in the picture below.

Two tags were hard-coded into the Arduino, which is to say their EPC was manually entered into the code, byte by byte, so the program could recognize them. When scanned, they printed their tag number, one or two, to the LCD screen. This will be very important when accepting or rejecting valid tags.

Identifying two known tags and a third unknown tag


The rest of the posts for this project have been arranged by date.

First time here?

Completed projects from year 1.

Completed projects from year 2.

Completed projects from year 3.

Completed projects from year 4.

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2018-06-24

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