Start • RFID Technology • High-Level Overview • Hardware • Software • Design Improvements • Sources and PDF

DESIGN IMPROVEMENTS

Although we were extremely happy with our result, this was our first time taking on such a project. Naturally, there is room for improvement. The first of these would have to be the construction process. For this project, we had a limited budget (we were required to spend no more than $50 or we would be penalized), and we didn’t have a lot of time to complete the system.

The system’s housing basically comprises a piece of wood tiling, four long screws, a reference PCB prototype board that Professor Land designed for the ATmega32, and our circuit on a piece of solder board. It served its purposes for our demonstration, but it did include a lot of exposed wires and circuits.

Additionally, it probably would have been better to move the actual code bank onto the administrator computer and edit using an administration program with a specialized GUI. This would have enabled us to store infinitely more codes and present a better interface. For the purposes of this project, however, it was more of a proof-of-concept than anything else. By keeping more things on the microcontroller, it better displayed our microcontroller-programming prowess.

We could have done several things differently in terms of the hardware. We could have used a DSP instead of envelope detection hardware. A simple FFT on the incoming signal from the tag would have told us everything we needed to know about it and made our design more flexible.

There are plenty of other design improvements to be made, but we’ll leave them up to you. At the very least, we hope that you have found this article informative. Now it’s your turn to start a project based on RFID technology. Good luck!