Industrial RFID

Does anyone have experience setting up an RFID system in an industrial setting. If so I've got a few questions:

1. How reliable are the systems in the presence of typicale industrial electrical noise?
2. How robust are the tags?
3. Where do you buy the tags from?
4. Does anyone know of someone who manufactures automated tag applicators?

http://www.balluff.com/Balluff/us/ProductsChannel/Overview/en/ID+Systems.htm

I have struggle with those little devils.. I don't know how reliable those are in very noisy electrical enviroment, but I assume there might be problems because the basic idea or rfid is radio frequency..

It depends a lot on your application which system to choose. Is tag moving or stopped? What is the reading distance? How much data have to be in tag? How reliable reading have to be? What is the material tag is mounted on? Is tag always on same angle?

try with pepperl-fuchs

http://www.pepperl-fuchs.com/selector/gui/master_ComplexTree.controller_selectNode.kly?encoway_currentTree_selectNode=1542_RFID&encoway_currentTreeName_select=tree_classification_1

I've never worked with them but the 802.11 radio protocal works well in the environment I deal with which also has a large amount of electrical noise if they use the same it should be ok. One tech we had here mentioned that the frequency of the radio is so much higher than the surrounding electrical noise that they shouldn't even see each other I'm not sure how much faith to place in that statement.

For palletized transfers, Escort is the most popular in the circles I work in.

We used the the 1st generation P&F, quite good in an industrial environment. In our setup, we used a Prolinx Serial to Ethernet/IP bridge to send the data to our AB PLC5. The 2nd generation stuff can send data directly to PLC.

Robust? We ran the tags through 250 degF. However, extreme duty tag like these are read only.

I do not remeber what brand it was we used but we used RFID Tags that could be programed on the fly at various read/write stations on our system. We had multiple UV curing systems powerfull enough to knock out cell phone signals but the UV curing systems never had an effect on the RFID Tags. THe Tages had to be within 1/2 inch to be written to and 2 inches to read.Everything we wrote to the tags was ASCII so it was not an issue with data tranfer to the various PLC's in the system. THe only downside was you did not get much of a warning when the batteries would die in the Tags. To get around that we included battery info in our data transfers so The PLC handling the main conveyour system would run the shuttles to a que if it was time to change batteries. You can store quite a bit of information on a tag. We even printed lables from the information loaded on the tags.