Wednesday, 30 November 2016
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
Sunday, 27 November 2016
Friday, 25 November 2016
Thursday, 24 November 2016
Wednesday, 23 November 2016
Monday, 21 November 2016
RFID to Help Consumers Know if Olive Oil Is Really Extra-Virgin
Olive oil producers in the Italian region of Tuscany are adopting an RFID-enabled service designed to better inform customers about the finer details of their products. Brands such as Buonamici, La Ranocchiaia, SPO and Il Cavallino are already integrating SpeedTap passive RFID tags created by Thin Film Electronics (Thinfilm) into the labels of their olive oil bottles. The tags utilize Near Field Communication (NFC) RFID technology; smartphones with the ability to read NFC RFID tags can access the cloud and pull up information about the olive oil from the database of a service known as iOlive.
For the iOlive initiative, each bottle's SpeedTap RFID tag is permanently encoded with a unique ID number and a URL. When an NFC-enabled smartphone or tablet is tapped to the bottle's label, the device's internet browser is directed to a special interactive web page related to that bottle of olive oil, thereby causing the browser to display a message verifying the product's authenticity, while also providing tasting notes and other relevant information.
According to the company, consumers should be able to purchase the RFID-tagged bottles by the end next month.
The olive oil industry, much like the wine industry, has a rich heritage in Italy that dates back hundreds of years, says Pietro Barachini, a professional olive oil taster and iOlive's founder. But while the wine industry has taken many steps to educate customers regarding how to evaluate, buy and enjoy wine, Thinfilm notes, the olive oil sector has been wracked with scandals that damaged consumer trust. A recent segment on the news program 60 Minutes alleged that some of Italy's top brands sold inferior oil that had been labeled as extra-virgin.
Barachini created iOlive in the hope that it would help inform olive oil customers in the same way that wine apps have informed wine customers. The service, which includes an app for Apple iPhones and iPads, was launched in 2014 at Agrietour, an annual agriculture exhibition held in Tuscany. The winner of a 2015 "Green Oscar", iOlive catalogues information regarding more than 150 of Tuscany's extra-virgin olive oils. The iOlive database digitizes the International Olive Council's profile sheet—which is used in 44 countries to certify extra-virgin products—and allows professional tasters to make their evaluations accessible to users.
SpeedTap tags are thin and flexible, measuring less than 300 micrometers (0.01 inch) in thickness—which, according to Thinfilm, makes them a suitable choice to be incorporated into labels. They are uniquely identifiable and almost impossible to clone, the firm reports, which should help to reduce the chances of fraudulent usage. The tag's electronic components, including its chip, are manufactured using a printing process, making the SpeedTap less expensive to produce than tags produced by conventional methods.
More information visit http://www.asiarfid.com
Friday, 18 November 2016
Tuesday, 15 November 2016
Tire Industry Works Toward Global RFID-Tagging Standards
A tire-industry working group led by Chinese rubber manufacturing equipment company Mesnac strives to standardize the way in which the tire industry uses radio frequency identification tags. This includes how those tags are attached in tires, as well as how they are tested and encoded with data.
The working group's efforts have resulted in four proposed ISO standards, all focused on passive EPC Gen 2 ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags. The ISO/NP 20909 standard provides performance and function requirements for tags used in tires, while ISO/NP 20910 consists of coding requirements and how data is written to and stored on tags. ISO/NP 20911 features methods and technologies related to one step in the process of attaching or embedding tags, and the ISO/NP 20912 standard provides testing methods for tags embedded in tires.
Mesnac's Dong Lanfei
The proposed standards were officially filed for consideration in June 2015, with the ISO/TC31/WG10 Workgroup established on Oct. 6, 2015, thereby signaling the start of the approximately three-year approvals process. The workgroup's next meeting is scheduled for next month. If everything goes well, the four standards are expected to become ratified by October 2018.
All four standards were drafted by Mesnac with input from tire industry firms, including global tire company Michelin and other manufacturers from China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, South Korea, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The proposed standards are based on existing automotive industry-based tire-tagging standards, including those of the Auto Industry Action Group (AIAG) (see Auto Industry RFID Data Standard Proposed), as well as other auto industry organizations, such as Odette International, the Japan Automotive Manufacturers Association (JAMA) and the Japan Auto Parts Industries Association.
In 2008, Michelin, Mesnac and China's Standardization Administration of China (SAC) Technical Committee, TC19, along with members of AIM Global China and GS1 China, met to create a regional Chinese tire RFID tag-use standard. These Chinese standards were published locally early this year. The effort now is to establish global versions that will enable tire manufacturers to uniformly select and embed RFID tags in order to assure interoperability. Such tags could then be used throughout a tire's life span, wherever it is located throughout the world, to track tires through the manufacturing and distribution processes. In addition, the tags could be accessed by tire users, such as bus companies or commercial operations with fleets of company vehicles.
Launched at the Qingdao University of Science and Technology in 2000, Mesnac designs and manufactures tire-making machinery, and also carries out research and development efforts.
In its research capacity, the company "is committed to R&D and innovation of information equipment, industrial software applications and new rubber material research," says Dong Lanfei, the chief engineer of Mesnac's Internet of Things division. Mesnac's customers use the company's software and equipment to produce tires from rubber materials. In addition, the firm has been working on RFID technology since 2005, and offers solutions enabling customers to embed, encode and test RFID tags in their products. Mesnac's customers can also utilize the RFID technology to track the incoming rubber and other raw materials, as well as semi-components and finished tires.
Mesnac finds that the use of RFID is increasing among tire manufacturers, Dong reports. However, she adds, current tire-related RFID standards, while established by the automotive sector, lack the details that tire manufacturers and others in the tire industry would need to uniformly track materials and tires throughout the supply chain.
More info visit http://www.asiarfid.com
Monday, 14 November 2016
Sunday, 13 November 2016
Thursday, 10 November 2016
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
Monday, 7 November 2016
Sunday, 6 November 2016
Friday, 4 November 2016
Thursday, 3 November 2016
Wednesday, 2 November 2016
Tuesday, 1 November 2016
RFID Brings Visibility to LCD Flat Display Manufacturer
LCD flat screen manufacturing company Innolux has installed a passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID system to track the arrivals and departures of vehicles and palletized goods at one of its plants in Taiwan. Since the solution was installed in June of this year, the company reports that it has boosted efficiency and reduced the incidence of errors that previously resulted from trucks going to the wrong dock door, or from goods being difficult to locate.
Innolux next plans to install the same system at its factories in China. The implementation consists of Alien Technology readers and UHF RFID tags, provided by EPC Solutions Taiwan. The tags—which were installed in the ground, as well as on forklifts, metal and plastic pallets, and shipping containers—were made by EPC Solutions using Alien Higgs 3 RFID chips. Innolux employs its own software to manage the collected RFID read data.
"This is [our] first warehouse shipping-management system," says Jacky Chung, Innolux's manager, "with the most advanced RFID technology installed in the company."
Established in 2003, Innolux claims to be the world's largest manufacturer of thin-film transistor (TFT) and LCD displays. Its customers include many leading information technology and consumer electronics manufacturers, such as Dell, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo, LG, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics and Sony.
Innolux has 14 plants in Taiwan, as well as several in China, and manufactures a range of panels and touch-control screens for consumer electronics products, such as televisions, desktop monitors, tablets and a variety of other touchscreen devices. Its operations are complex, the company reports. Some components are partially built at one facility, then are moved to one or more others for additional assembly prior to being shipped to customers. For that reason, trucks come and go from each plant to deliver materials, as well as partially assembled products, and pick up partially assembled or finished goods for customers. Managing trucks' movements, as well as ensuring that palletized goods are placed on the correct truck, has been a challenging task. The company attempted to use active RFID tags, but found that the technology did not work. The problem was that RF signals transmitted by the tags spilled from one dock door to the next, and the system was unable to discern the specific dock door at which a particular truck or pallet was located.
The company approached EPC Solutions Taiwan for a system that could operate with EPC UHF RFID technology at its main facility. Innolux wanted to know when trucks had arrived, as well as at which door a vehicle was loaded and unloaded. This information would not only create a record of what was received, and from which vehicle, but also identify when an error was being made, in the event that the wrong pallet was being placed onto a truck.
EPC Solutions Taiwan installed 17 Alien ALR-9680 readers, including two at each dock door. One of those two readers, mounted on the ceiling above a dock door's loading platform, captures the ID numbers of the tags embedded in the ground and attached to shipping containers. The other reader is mounted to the side of the doorway, where it captures the IDs of tags attached to forklifts and pallets.
When a truck arrives at the facility's gate, the driver first registers with a gate employee, then fills out paperwork indicating what is being picked up or delivered. A UHF tag is attached to the right bottom of the shipping container being hauled by the truck, by means of a magnet. "During the project installation, we had to develop a tag for trucks," says John Chiu, EPC Solutions Taiwan's project manager. "It is returnable, durable and easy to remove—and it has to be on metal. So we use magnets instead of glue or screws." The unique ID number encoded to that tag is stored in Innolux's RFID software, along with details regarding the vehicle and which goods and materials are being delivered or picked up. The driver then follows instructions from the gate officer to report to the specific dock door at which his or her vehicle is expected. As the worker moves toward the appropriate door, one of three readers captures the shipping container's tag ID number in order to confirm that the vehicle is traveling in the correct direction.
More info visit http://www.asiarfid.com
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