Has anyone implemented RFID tracking? I am mainly interested in the tags, reader and antenna you used and how it was to integrate them.
We use microfluidic chips which don’t have a good place for a barcode that relies on line of sight and I am thinking RFID is the way to go.
Thanks
I am also interested in this. I looked into this a few years ago but the cost did not scale well for our platform at the time.
Just curious but are there any additional embedded signifiers on the chip or is the goal to make it observable to robots and humans?
Why didn’t it scale well?
No, the chips do not currently have any unique features or identifiers. Everything has been manually labelled and tracked so far. The chips actually need to ‘tagged’ at two stages. Once during manufacturing and then later when they are used for an experiment. I want to use the RFID for the first tracking and I can use barcodes for the later tracking. Both will be read into an automated imaging systems. The first tagging does not need to be human readable. The later barcode will be human readable.
At scale, it was just a significant cost compared to established methods in lab. I’m talking about tens of millions.
I do believe RFID is a better way to track tubes, plates, reagents but also imaging technology has significantly improved and it’s cheaper for now.
RFID is definitely an amazing technology especially for -80 C samples where barcodes can be covered or iced over. Unfortunately, it’s cost prohibited and to luis’s point, it doesn’t scale very well because of that.