Inventory control
A warehouse needs to know what sits on its shelves. A barcode has to be brought into a scanner's line of sight, by a person or by a conveyor. A wet or scratched label may not scan at all. And a count made by hand starts to go stale as soon as the stock moves again.
How the original system could serve it
The ActiveWave system could count stock where it stood. Each item or case would carry a tag, and readers would cover the storage area. At set intervals the host software would ask the tags to report, so the count would stay current without anyone moving or scanning a thing.
The old site described software that went further with the count. It could produce the shipping and receiving documents, and order more of a product when its stock ran low. The old site also listed benefits for picking and for stock levels, and it gave no figures for them.
The compactTag was made for bins and crates. The jumboTag could flash or beep, so that someone could find one tagged item on a shelf. The Handheld Reader went looking for a single item by its tag's ID.
What a builder would need
A builder would need tags on the stock and enough readers to hear the whole storage area. Host software would keep the count and the stock records. Field generators would split the area into zones, so that the count could also say where each item sits.
The rebuild's first system is one reader, one field generator and three tags in two zones. That proves the parts, and it is far from a warehouse. The TigeRFID design study tests its choices against three scenarios, and one of them is a warehouse that counts 100,000 items in minutes.
Building one today
Nobody has rebuilt the original hardware recently, so nobody knows whether the old files still make a working system. The TigeRFID project's study of the original found firmware for the sealTag only, and the rebuild's sealTag is a new design. A rebuild writes all of its firmware fresh.
The TigeRFID project is rebuilding the system from the ground up, for a complete beginner with free tools. To build your own, start at the TigeRFID repository, whose readme tells where the rebuild stands.
Nothing on this site says a rebuild may transmit on the original radios' frequencies as they are. Radio rules differ by country, and the TigeRFID project checks them before it chooses a rebuild's radios.
If you build one, or try, please report back in the repository's issues. What works and what fails both help the next builder.
Sources:
- the old site's Inventory Control page and its featured-application box, as it served them until October 2026;
- the compactTag, jumboTag and Handheld Reader pages on this site;
- the TigeRFID readme on its main branch, for the design study's scenarios.