RaceDB: RFID tags can work between Organizers

Post date: Jul 27, 2015 6:53:15 PM

As passive RFID gains in popularity, we are increasingly seeing "tag proliferation": riders with multiple tags on their bikes for all the different races they ride in. In addition to being ugly, this leads to mistakes including bringing the wrong tag, or over-writing the tag value from another organizer.

Why can't things be simple?

Riders have one RFID tag.

It works at any race, regardless of the race or which organizer issued the tag.

Unthinkable? Impossible? Science fiction?

There is an astonishingly simple solution...

Use the Rider's License as the RFID tag code.

RaceDB now supports this.

Rider's RFID tags can now work across different organizers with different RaceDB databases because the rider's all have the same license code.

Save time, save money, reduce errors. Make it easy for riders to mount one tag on their bike an participate at multiple races run by different organizers.

The method to create an efficient representation of license codes as RFID tags is available and documented (it is a bit tricky as EPC RFID only supports 96 bits or 12 bytes).

RaceDB is an open-source project (see here).

With the same tag representation, non-RaceDB systems could interoperate with RaceDB, as well as each other.