Software | Application | Tracking | Vehicle Tracking
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| Tracking pit stops for race cars |
| by Chuck Perilli |
I am working with a sports car racing series that requires each car to make a pit stop for a minimum length of time. This is currently done manually with stopwatches and is tedious and error prone.
My proposed RFID solution is a tag on each car (passive preferred if possible) and readers at the pit entrance and pit exit. Cars will be passing within 2 or 3 meters of the readers at a slow speed so I'm hoping a passive tag can be used. The output of both readers will be sent via a wireless link to a laptop computer located in the timing building. The software on this computer will calculate the time each car was in the pits. The readers must be weatherproof, operate off 12 volts DC, and provide RS-232 serial or USB output. We will use readily available 900Mhz modems for the wireless link. We will write the software.
Questions:
1. Does this sound plausible?
2. Does anyone know of an available solution?
3. If anyone is interested in proposing a solution, we are prepared to purchase 2 systems (4 readers) for a proof of concept prototype test at several races early next year.
Thank you,
Chuck Perilli
turbocup@hotmail.com |
| Question last updated on October 08, 2007, 03:11 AM |
| Total views: 2385 |
| Answer |
| by Addison2761, Chuck Perilli, Us Rfid |
Hi, Chuck,
First, I doubt the passive tag solution is going to work. Definitely you can not use LF and HF due to short reading distance. UHF is feasbile. However, where you attach the tag to your car, on your wheel, bumper? Also you need to be careful the metal body of your car may have interference in correct reading, not mention heavy rain in bad whether. In my opinion, active RFID tag is the solution to your problem. Although the tag is much more expensive compared with passive tag, I am assuming you are going to track a few not a few thousand at the same time. So the cost of active RFID tag is not a big issue. You can attach the tag on the windshield inside the car and I believe you can capture the information even if you are driving at speed of 100 miles/hr. Contact with TI and they have similar successful solutions for many Tollways for a long time.
Good luck!
Active tags which are mounted in the vehicle with an edge server (e.g. SmartInstrument offered by Reltronics Technologies) in each vehicle may be an alternative as well. The edge server is offered by Reltronics Technologies and can be vehicle mounted since it works on a 12V DC. The edge server will certainly take all the tag reads. Alternatively, and a much cheaper solution is to utilize the edge server at the pit stop with an antenna that reads active tags. You do get useable tags that maybe logical for your application since they don't care of the metal content. The bottom line is to be selective with the antenna and the tag data propagation. Hope this helps.
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| Answer last updated on October 11, 2007, 22:41 PM |
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