For this week, as per the schedule I was working on interfacing with the RFID reader and the Farsens tags. After some extremely tedious time trying (and finally successfully) getting the ThingMagic API working on the Rasperry Pi, I was not able to interface with the RFID reader to read any tag data consistently. Moving towards a more simple API, I tried using the Arduino library that accompanies the Sparkfun M6e nano reader. Although simpler in capabilities, as a group we decided that its basic functionality was determined to cover the scope of our project. Although able to read some basic information from the Farsens tags, I was not ultimately successful in reading the User Data from the tags, although perfectly capable to do so with the commercial (not battery free sensing) tags. David and I sat down for a while trying to trouble shoot why this was the case.
We tried powering the reader of an external power supply, allowing us to use a higher read power level (the Farsens tags have capacitors that need to be charged before they are functional). When that ultimately did not bring us much success, we leafed through the the documentation again and tried using a power supply to power the tag itself, so the capacitor would not be an issue, but still we unable to produce results. Although the tags and the RFID reader respond to standard commercial commands, ultimately we struggled to find any useful documentation on how to work with these products given our current setup. Due to the niche nature of the tags we are dealing with, it seems there has not been a ton of work to research how to troubleshoot any of the problems we came across, leading some concerns to be addressed in the Team Report.
Even though my RFID ventures were not successful this week, I still had the role of integrating the complete system of the application and the sensors somehow. In order to prepare for the demo on Monday, I wrote a script that interfaces with the output of the toilet paper sensor and communicates the results of the data from its calculations with the database, which in turn updates the application in real time. Currently it’s running from my laptop but it could very easily be put on the Pi without any modification, I just did not have it on hand at the time.
I personally feel behind on my own progress this week and in turn that of the team progress. In the next week, I along with the rest of the team will be considering modifications to the scope of the project as well as trying to figure out any way to remedy the issues we have come across in the last week.
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