I recently discovered a third-party function in MATLAB that draws arrows in figures. It’s quite versatile. It was a very helpful tool to finish writing a paper. Unexcitingly, it’s called “arrow.m“.
Trying to push out a submission by early December. Did some experiments by collecting RFID traces. Going to run some algorithms with those traces. Right now the research is focused on tracking. Specifically the idea is to recover a path. So I guess the idea can be classified as tracking. Also working on some cool 3D visualizations in MATLAB. More to come.
The first ever Wireless Summer school is winding down. I still find it funny that they just called it “Wireless”. They could have called it “Wireless Systems”, or “Wireless Networks” or something similar. But I guess the idea was that this was supposed to give a broad overview of all wireless theory and technologies. So just using “Wireless” covers all bases. Although it was broad, it was still quite deep in some of the sessions. Let’s hope this can continue next year. I think a week is a bit long though. Maybe three days, but with more stuff packed in each day would be better.
This technology/idea is pretty cool. It definitely is much simpler on the front-end than RFID/NFC. But the back-end required to support it seems quite burdensome. I’m not totally sure it will fly. But it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
Continuing to play with the Alien tags. Below is a picture of the tags lined up. The other picture is configuring/testing the code to draw heat maps.
Playing with the heat maps in MATLAB. They have functions automating basic heat maps. Google for more details.
I still refuse to call them Touchatags. Anyways, RFIDIOt seems to be beyond my Linux-on-a-Mac skills. libnfc took some work to set up. But so far I can read Tikitags with my Touchatag reader. Yay! libnfc is extremely new. It’s probably because it’s so bare right now that I can easily work with it. I’m trying to make some magic work with it now.
Sadly, I don’t think I can hack Octopus cards. Besides the fact that they have security, they don’t follow standards, because there weren’t any when Octopus first came around, accroding to Wikipedia.
I was greeted with the message “Alein is Alive!!!” from the serial port when I booted up the Alien RFID reader. Really cool stuff. Maybe we can start doing some crazy experiments over the summer. I have some ideas, especially with Cameron. Maybe incorporating both long range UHF and short range NFC.
So the semester is winding down. It started off a bit slow, probably due to the weather. But now, things have been real busy in the last few weeks. Hopefully the momentum will be carried over into the summer.
I hope to play more with the Tikitags. They look really fun. I want to really get my hands dirty and start scanning things, like my Octopus card.
2D barcodes are really cool. But I thought RFID/NFC was supposed to kill barcodes altogether?
