Manufacturing lines
A factory may build several products on one line, or build each item to order. Either way, it has to know which steps each item has been through, and which remain.
How the original system could serve it
A tag would ride with each item down the line, and the line would write its record onto the tag as each step finished. The old site's example was a personal computer. As each part went in, the tag would keep the list of what that computer contained. The item would carry its own status, with no paperwork beside it.
Workers on the line could read the tag to see which steps were done and which tests remained. The reader could also tell the central production database when each step was complete.
Later, the tag's record could produce the shipping list and the invoice. It could also stay on the product, so that a technician in the field could read its features, its date of manufacture and its revision.
Writing to a tag took a reader that could write as well as read. The Handheld Reader could read and program single tags by hand, and the Programming Station Reader wrote each tag's ID and settings.
What a builder would need
A builder would need tags with memory the line can write, and a reader at each station that writes as well as reads. Software would keep the production database.
The rebuild's first milestone reads tags, shows them moving between zones and raises alarms. Writing an item's history onto its tag is not part of it.
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 Manufacturing Lines page and its featured-application box, as it served them until October 2026;
- the Handheld Reader and Programming Station Reader pages on this site;
- the TigeRFID project plan on its main branch, for the rebuild's first milestone.