Tag physical items

#1

Hi everyone, Soner here👋

Not sure this is the right place to post this!

I’m working on a project that involves tracking items like clothing, cds, dvds, books etc during their life-cycle. Books for instance comes with an ISBN number but this is identical at each copy of the same book.

Same story (even worse) with fashion items. I need some sort of a serial number to retrofit to them, so that we can track each individual copy of the book.

Perhaps a QR code or NFC tag or any other creative way you can think of.

Has anyone looked into this by any chance?

Thanks.
Soner

#2

@toranaga111 This is going to need a lot of context.

QR or NFC tags are used to connect information. So for example a URL.

If you want to be storing data that has a unique key to each item this is what Databases are for. SQL databases (as far as I know) all work on the same principle

data is stored in tables that can be linked, each item gets a unique key (normally an index number).
You then search that data for what you want, so item 4 and this will tell you whatever data you put in it, purchase date, cost or whatever else you want to store in it.

This allows searching, so give me all of the books with the the ISBN XXXX purchased before YYYY

A tool can be used to grab this data that is easier for the end user (a website is a common example of this)

Last time I tried to make something like this I used Django This is a really simple tool for some simple projects but I have been told it doesn’t scale well

I am most likely in the space tomorrow from the early afternoon if you would like to talk about this in more detai

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#3

I did some NFC tag indexing at work recently, one thing to watch out for is that there are a ton of different standards for NFC & RFID tags, and they’re mostly not compatible with eachother

I’d say the best thing is to find a set of tags that work for your use case, then find a reader/writer module that’s compatible with it - I’d go for iso14443 tags if you want to use readily available readers, although iso15693 has way better range & is the standard if you need to use a plc.

I used a PN5180 card off eBay, with an Arduino and can send you my source code if you want something to get you started :slight_smile:

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#4

I actually have a set of adhesive NFC tags I never ended up having a use for, you can have them if you want they’re just taking up space in a drawer