[Koha-devel] Wondering about RFID support

Francisco M. Marzoa Alonso fmmarzoa at gmx.net
Fri Nov 29 02:55:02 CET 2002


Greetings, I cannot see from this lab how is the weather like in Madrid...

One of my main goals in the use of koha (when I'll be able to understand it, 
in one or two centuries...) is to implement RFID support on it to substitute 
these old, slow, obsolete and "de modè" barcode readers ;-)

There are some differences between barcode readers and RFID ones, the ones 
that makes the matter are:

- RFID reader can read several tags at once
- RFID reader read continously, instead by user interation
- As far as I know, by its wide application field, there are no RFID reader 
devices that can be connected between keyboard and PC emulating typing. The 
ones that we develop can be connected directly to a serial port using RS232 
or RS484 or by Ethernet with an aditional module.

So, it seems not to be possible to have the reader conected directly in a 
terminal station. 

I think the best solution could be code a daemon in the server side that deals 
with RFID readers, and then a CGI script that deals with that daemon to 
perform read/write operations. The readers can be directly connected to 
serial port on little libraries, where the server and the reader could be 
near, and through Ethernet where there is a big distance between them.

I would like to hear opinions if available, of course.

Thx.




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