Technology Demo

Recently I have been working on a technology demo assignment. For this assignment, we each had to take a piece of essential TUI technology, figure out how to use it, and design a simple system that would allow us to demo the technology to the class.

My technology was an OBID i-scan RFID reader/writer. This is a very cool piece of technology that allows you to identify objects by placing RFID tags on them. These tags come in the form of small, square stickers. Once an object is tagged, it can be identified simply by placing it on the RFID antenna attached to the reader. Tags can also be written to simply by placing them on the antenna.

For my demo, I wrote two programs. The first is a Virtual Hardware Store application, which can read tags for 5 different tools: a hammer, an adjustable wrench, a tape measure, a philips-head screwdriver, and a flat-head screwdriver. These have RFID tags on them with DSFID numbers 1-5. When a tool is identified, my software shows a picture of that tool on the screen, displays the item's name and price, and adds the price to a running total. The second program I wrote is a command-line utility that allows the user to write the DSFID number on an RFID tag. The user simply places the tag on the RFID antenna, inputs a number to write to the tag's DSFID, and removes the tag.

This assignment was fairly straightforward, but I had a bit of trouble with the portability of my applications. I found that when I compiled my code into executable jar files, my programs would not be able to access the computer's COM ports correctly. I therefore had to use Apache ant to run my programs. This created a portability issue as many computers do not have ant installed and it is not the easiest thing for a user to configure properly. I therefore decided to package ant with my software. I also had an installation issue where my software was packaged with several images, Java libraries, files associated with ant, etc. I had to then create an installer batch file to copy these files to a user's computer and create a batch file on the desktop which will run my two programs using ant. This portability portion of the assignment took my quite some time, but I believe I have my software to a point where it is very easy to install and use on nearly any Windows XP or Vista machine.