Ray Seidel
Member
[ This thread was moved from the serial power and data thread in the finished project section - Hippy ]
Hello Jurjen and interesting forum members. I happened on your thread while reflecting on a project challenge before me. I joined your forum.
Your SerialPower (Remote device power delivery plus multi-point data traffic) concept seems a little like RS485 (or C-Bus) and this is in the part of my challenge.
The theme of my problem is this...
Say you have seventeen thousand (or more) cattle in a "feedLot", where they are contained in what are known as "home-pens" for the next one hundred days...during this time they are feed a special diet to progressively increase their body weight...(for the obvious reason).
Each home pen will contain say 100, near identical animals... a decanting truck loads a feed trough at one end and a water trough is at the other.
Every beast has an RFID ear-tag...this being of the 134.2khz HDX type (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_11784_&_11785 ) for a brief description.
As you see there are a lot of pens and a lot more cows...this is a big undertaking
A "massive number" of "small" RFID readers will be retrofitted along the cattle side lip of the communal feeding troughs ...one place for each beast of the 100 beasts in each pen...in essence this is a parallel processing problem, as they all eat at the same time....
During this time the "feedLot" desire to know two things, daily:
1. are their individual eating habits regular...(an indirect analogue for animal health)...judged by time of arrival at the feed-trough and durant of their stay.
2. is the rate of weight gain appropiate for the beasts to reach a target weight and body mass composition (marbled or lean meat etc)...minutes eating.
If the beasts could be convinced to eat one after another in single file at one trough...the solution to monitoring "time and spacial location" would be trivial.
So, consider this...I have seventeen thousand "mini readers" and I need to know the ID of each reader and the ID of each beast visiting that reader and the date and time (in quanta of minutes) spent feeding. They come and go, and a spreadsheet will "smudge" the feeding recordings.
Typical of the inferences to be gained from the "spread-sheeting" of this data is the early identification of a "sick" animal should he consistently be last to arrive at the feed trough, reinforced by confirming he regularly uses a high numbered feed trough RFID reader... people who understand animal behavior will use the data in the spread-sheet as they will for what they want.
Do not dismiss this as a project that is not serious because of the huge number of reading stations...it is under serious consideration, think of it as perhaps not a classic case but an extreme case and possible docking station for your SerialPower concept.
It may well be the "two-wire" concept is unable to supply sufficient DC power to each distant reader...probably a heavy gauge "AC or DC power bus" will be required....this is not a problem it just means more copper. Would that destroy or cripple your concept...I think not.
I may well be that to address 17,000 RFID readers (up to perhaps 60,000 in a future time and place) will take too long if each were to be polled sequentially...
Remember that "real-time" information is not necessary and the information in each reader could be solicited and decanted over several hours while the cattle are asleep... even a baud rate of 2400 is too fast! ...try thinking down near 300 (revisit some earlier more primitive, yet less noise prone time?)
It seems each reader will need to hold a buffer of "one minute present or absent events) surely this is a easy thing for picaxe to do?...the real problem is decanting the day's eating records in a timely way.... rocket speed does not seem to be needed but clear thinking does.
I am far from being out of the woods just yet... there are issues concerning establishing the best "RFID detection volume" and relative orientation of tag and reader coils etc. I have sound experience in using and designing RFID cattle/sheep readers... my interest lies in capturing multiple abreast fast moving animals...data collisions come into play, however my theme is "the massive array" and chaos behavior ...this feedlot trough-reader project may yet be "just a bridge too far for me" , but we shall see....perhaps as my new friends you can conceive how picaxe can help.
Jurjen and fellow form friends...I will stop here, for a while and ask your thoughts as to whether SerialPower has the potential "horsepower" to be considered a possibility...I realize it is still a "work-in-progress".... but it seems you have made good progress...are you still enthusiastic to keep going?
Regards
Ray
Hello Jurjen and interesting forum members. I happened on your thread while reflecting on a project challenge before me. I joined your forum.
Your SerialPower (Remote device power delivery plus multi-point data traffic) concept seems a little like RS485 (or C-Bus) and this is in the part of my challenge.
The theme of my problem is this...
Say you have seventeen thousand (or more) cattle in a "feedLot", where they are contained in what are known as "home-pens" for the next one hundred days...during this time they are feed a special diet to progressively increase their body weight...(for the obvious reason).
Each home pen will contain say 100, near identical animals... a decanting truck loads a feed trough at one end and a water trough is at the other.
Every beast has an RFID ear-tag...this being of the 134.2khz HDX type (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_11784_&_11785 ) for a brief description.
As you see there are a lot of pens and a lot more cows...this is a big undertaking
A "massive number" of "small" RFID readers will be retrofitted along the cattle side lip of the communal feeding troughs ...one place for each beast of the 100 beasts in each pen...in essence this is a parallel processing problem, as they all eat at the same time....
During this time the "feedLot" desire to know two things, daily:
1. are their individual eating habits regular...(an indirect analogue for animal health)...judged by time of arrival at the feed-trough and durant of their stay.
2. is the rate of weight gain appropiate for the beasts to reach a target weight and body mass composition (marbled or lean meat etc)...minutes eating.
If the beasts could be convinced to eat one after another in single file at one trough...the solution to monitoring "time and spacial location" would be trivial.
So, consider this...I have seventeen thousand "mini readers" and I need to know the ID of each reader and the ID of each beast visiting that reader and the date and time (in quanta of minutes) spent feeding. They come and go, and a spreadsheet will "smudge" the feeding recordings.
Typical of the inferences to be gained from the "spread-sheeting" of this data is the early identification of a "sick" animal should he consistently be last to arrive at the feed trough, reinforced by confirming he regularly uses a high numbered feed trough RFID reader... people who understand animal behavior will use the data in the spread-sheet as they will for what they want.
Do not dismiss this as a project that is not serious because of the huge number of reading stations...it is under serious consideration, think of it as perhaps not a classic case but an extreme case and possible docking station for your SerialPower concept.
It may well be the "two-wire" concept is unable to supply sufficient DC power to each distant reader...probably a heavy gauge "AC or DC power bus" will be required....this is not a problem it just means more copper. Would that destroy or cripple your concept...I think not.
I may well be that to address 17,000 RFID readers (up to perhaps 60,000 in a future time and place) will take too long if each were to be polled sequentially...
Remember that "real-time" information is not necessary and the information in each reader could be solicited and decanted over several hours while the cattle are asleep... even a baud rate of 2400 is too fast! ...try thinking down near 300 (revisit some earlier more primitive, yet less noise prone time?)
It seems each reader will need to hold a buffer of "one minute present or absent events) surely this is a easy thing for picaxe to do?...the real problem is decanting the day's eating records in a timely way.... rocket speed does not seem to be needed but clear thinking does.
I am far from being out of the woods just yet... there are issues concerning establishing the best "RFID detection volume" and relative orientation of tag and reader coils etc. I have sound experience in using and designing RFID cattle/sheep readers... my interest lies in capturing multiple abreast fast moving animals...data collisions come into play, however my theme is "the massive array" and chaos behavior ...this feedlot trough-reader project may yet be "just a bridge too far for me" , but we shall see....perhaps as my new friends you can conceive how picaxe can help.
Jurjen and fellow form friends...I will stop here, for a while and ask your thoughts as to whether SerialPower has the potential "horsepower" to be considered a possibility...I realize it is still a "work-in-progress".... but it seems you have made good progress...are you still enthusiastic to keep going?
Regards
Ray
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