RFID Quick Checkout

The retail markets and shopping bazaars have totally changed the note of shopping in the current scenario. The concept of retail shopping had draped the market so skillfully that people even don’t mind waiting in long queues at payment counters before checking out of the retail marts. To ease this long waiting time, young electronic engineers from Cornell University have come up with a new project called RFID Checkout.

The easy availability and increased affordability of RFID tags have proved them to be a better substitute to the prevalent barcode system. The RFID Checkout system will enable customers, to instantly pay for their entire purchase upon arrival at the register. The USP of this system is that the RFID reader would be able to read multiple tags in a sensor area simultaneously which is not possible with the barcode system due to the problem of frequency collision, hence creating frequency ambiguity.

The hardware for this checkout system involves Skyetek M1 Module and the Protoboard with ATmega644 microcontroller. The Skyetek M1 Module is a multi-protocol RFID read/write module. It can read almost all industry-standard 13.56 MHz RFID tags. This module comes integrated with the anti-collision mechanism.

MCU ATmega644 here, as always is the brain behind the maestro..!! The information or the signals from the RFID tags is transmitted to the Skyetek module through the ports of the microcontroller using UART. The unit is also integrated with other applications like Led indicators, power switch, etc.

The source code for this checkout system broadly covers areas like RFID tags information and decoders to recognize a particular tag.

The custom-made antenna on the reader has a comparatively wide range of operation than the stock antennas.