Problem Description

Nowadays there’s an increasing need for transferring information between the physical and electronic world. In some applications there’s also a need for capturing events based on physical actions, i.e. a person has entered in a specific area or a product has moved from one location into another. This information can be used in several ways, like updating a social profile in Facebook or creating a new entry in Twitter.

RFID Solution

RFID technology can be used to tag physical objects or persons carrying personal badges, in order to track their movement into large buildings or retail stores. With the user’s consent, this information can be used to update their social electronic profile. Alternatively, we can create an entry in other social media for an object. Constituting a basic infrastructure for the “Internet of Things” we can, for example, manage a Twitter feed based on actions or events that otherwise would be impossible to capture.

Brief Project Description

This project involves the development of a simple application that will capture RFID tags that will be tracked inside the range of a fixed RFID reader. Based on a predefined set of allowed tags the application will filter the recorded tags and send events in a back-end system. These events will be used to generate personalized content to a display (e.g. show a photo of the person standing in front of the reader) and update a social profile in Facebook (e.g. create a ‘Like’ event). The main functionality (data capture & event handling) can be tested using basic TCP/IP programming and a windows application developed in a standard PC. In order to facilitate a completely standalone operation of the reader without a PC managing the reader, the data capture module will be ported in a Linux platform that is embedded in the RFID reader (using a C language API or Linux shell scripts).

Project Tasks

1)Reader module

This module will be running on the embedded Linux platform (on–reader) and is used to capture all tags in the vicinity of the RFID reader’s integrated antenna. Based on a predefined rule-set the reader will trigger events sent to the back-end server.

2) Server module

On the server-side, a simple windows application will display information based on the triggered event (e.g. display the ID on the screen, or a photo of the person standing in front of the reader).

3) Social network integration

The server will use a social networking module in order to update information on a Twitter feed and a Facebook social profile. This functionality will be implemented used using the Facebook/Twitter developer APIs that are available on these two popular social networking platforms.