Hi everyone,
I am not sure this is the right place for this post it seemed the most relevant to me, please redirect me to the right place.
As far as I know ZigBee is a technology used for position management of personnel and equipment trow an enterprise and several access points.
We are working on a R&D project for an underground company, we will need to read a pre-existing RFID active tag which operates at 2.4Ghz and 802.11 protocol compliant. (so this may be slightly different from the 802.15.4 for ZigBee).
Many underground mines use active RFID tags to track people both for safety and data management, we will build a machine which need to read this tag in order to store in a database the details of the last operator working on this machine.
At this moment I am interested in knowing what options we have, I did some reading and it seems I can read the tag with a normal AP but I guess I need to have some sort of firmware running on it able to stream the data read from the tag to an external unit.
The external unit (PLC, so CAN bus with raw CAN/CANopen interface or raw RS232, or HMI, so Modbus TCP over Ethernet) will have to store the data in internal memory.
My question is if this is achievable with off the shelves products or I need to write the software inside the AP.
We would like to have the AP functionality as well so we will be able to connect to the HMI (it runs a web server) trow a tablet with a point to point connection.
If yes, what platform and software environment I should use?
Thanks to everyone who will share his experience on this.
Claudio
