Issue #150 | Friday the 13th, June 2008 | by Andy Kowl


This week at the Sensors Expo show in Chicago, the morphing of RFID continued. Throughout the Stephens Convention Center, wireless RF devices with unique ID’s were for sale – virtually none of them called RFID.

From the first time I examined a variety of Savi’s military and global shipping tags, it was clear that RFID and sensors were made for each other. There were active RFID tags with temperature and humidity sensors to be used in plastic or metal crates during transport or storage. One active tag had light and vibration sensors to warn against door openings and intrusions along with the temperature and humidity sensors.

These are RFID cocktails. Talented mixologists can blend these in limitless ways with ingredients ranging from tilt to radioactivity sensors.

To be sure, these will never be counted as that unicorn of RFID – the 5¢ tag. But even at a hundred dollars or two, they could be cheap. Larry Blue, CEO of Hi-G-Tek, recently told me a container of fine chocolate is worth almost three-quarters of a million dollars, while a container of ruined chocolate is sold for cattle-feed. That’s a swing of more than two Franklins by my count.

I predict the combination of RF and ID and sensors will become more and more prevalent, eclipsing all uses of RFID other than embedded, which is destined to reign as number one in the long run. You will see RFID cocktails start to replace sensorless RFID, even in the asset tracking implementations being installed today, in addition to all the uses on display at Sensors Expo.

When the analysts catch up with these predictions, we’ll let the “experts” attach dollar signs to them.* It just makes too much economic sense for certain assets not to have sensors added to the ID; and profits always drive adoption more surely than mandates. With the technology on display this week, it is clear both the price point, and the footprint, of today’s active RFID-sensor tags will keep getting smaller.

When definitions are not definitive
The show theme was “Advances in Measurement, Monitoring, Detection and Control,” certainly a description that many RFID products would fall into. Pretty much everything at the show was wireless, most of the sensors and networks operating in the unregulated UHF frequencies 860-960 MHz, according to the usual regional standards.

As opposed to the predominant passive UHF tags in the RFID world, these read points are powered, so would be called “active.” But that is only if these were RFID tags. Of the more than 200 exhibitors present, I could count on one hand exhibits promoting those four letters. Other than distributing our 20 Leading RFID Innovators books, I don’t believe Texas Instruments mentioned “RFID” in their displays, nor did Omron, Infineon or STMicro, RFID producers all.

It is no surprise that plenty of the sensor technology being sold uses some sort of unique identifier. After all, if you had smoke detectors in your building, and one of them went off, don’t you think it would be helpful to know precisely which sensor the smoke caused to alert you? If your chemical plant had sensors warning against moisture or heat, would a general alarm be “good enough?”

Being “the RFID guy” present, I felt compelled ask “the sensor people” about the inclusion of unique ID’s. I can report, with surprise, that about half of them spent no time thinking about that. Effectively, hundreds of company reps were selling RFID-related products and didn’t know it.

This is a reflection of the fact that, for many of them, their view of RFID is like that of the Wall Street Journal – if it is not a passive tag suitable for delivery to Wal-Mart, then how could it possibly be RFID? After talking, most agreed they were, indeed, in the RFID business. A couple of exhibitors who include standards-based RFID within their products leave it off their sales literature fearing confusion among those who only knew of RFID as barcode replacement technology.

The most complex mix to date
There was some interesting technology at the show we will cover in articles and interviews in the near future. For now, as a toast to the coming together of sensors and RFID, I present my nomination as “The Long Island Iced Tea of RFID Cocktails” to eKo.

Crossbow Technology of San Jose, Calif., calls the eKo Pro Series, “The technology of environmental monitoring.” By using the eKo Nodes and their wireless mesh network, you can remotely monitor real-time growing conditions from any computer. The nodes can track air and soil temperatures, water usage, soil moisture, relative humidity and oncoming weather events.

These are “geo asset tracking” devices. Each node has a microprocessor with the unique ID on a radio board, powered by rechargeable batteries and solar cell, with a range from 500 to 1500 feet, depending on deployment. Typically, each includes GPS; a Watermark Irrometer for soil moisture; a sensor from Davis measuring soil temperature; a Crossbow accelerometer to measure both air temperature and humidity; and a light sensor. To top this bad boy off, they have added a microphone, for animals, intruders and for thunder, wind and other weather sounds.

The unfortunate thing is Crossbow decided to use a proprietary technology for their RF communication. In the long run this will be self-limiting in the marketplace. I suspect it mostly is a reflection of how the sensor crowd has paid no attention to the RFID market. Perhaps after winning this prestigious Iced Tea award, the will come to their senses and get in synch with RFID standards.

*One day analysts will “be the first” to tell you what we just did. The only question remains whether any of the sales of these devices will be counted as RFID sales. They are virtually never included in current RFID market predictions that we have seen.