How it works
How RFID Flow works, from the tag to the board.
Passive UHF RFID tags ride on your parts, fixed readers watch every stage and storage area, and a live board shows where each part is and how long it has waited.
System at a glance
Tag
Passive UHF · EPC Gen2
Readers
Sized to your floor
Antennas
Near-field + long-range
Tracks
Every part, every stage
Reports
Location + wait time
Uplink
Reads over HTTPS
A tag that rides the part for years
PT-0417
Bearing unit · serialised
UHF EPC Gen2
EPC E280 0000 0000 0000 0417
Linked in software
One rugged tag on the container, its own tag on each serialised part; the software holds the link.
Every part carries a passive UHF RFID tag: no battery, it wakes on the reader's signal and answers with its ID, and it lasts years through heat, oil, and handling.
A tag flat against steel goes quiet, so metal is the hard case: those parts get on-metal tags with a small standoff; a container of loose parts gets one rugged tag, plus a tag on each serialised part that matters, and the software links part to container to location.
Readers where the floor needs them
A multiplexer lets one fixed reader sweep up to 32 read points, many times a minute; every read is stamped with the point that saw it, so a part's location is settled by which point read it.
You place fixed readers at the stage boundaries and storage areas that matter, each driving its own read points, and a bigger floor adds readers.
Your board
live, from any browser
reads over HTTPS
Fixed reader
one radio, its read points
Multiplexer
up to 32 read points
Zone 01
bounded
Zone 02
bounded
Zone 03
bounded
Zone 04
bounded
Doorway
boundary
bounded: one spot
boundary: a crossing
One reader and its read points. Illustrative.
Designed for your floor
Three kinds of read point; which ones a floor gets, and where they go, is a design decision.
Bounded read point
close range
A near-field antenna holds a read to one spot: a container, a cell, a storage spot. Its field falls off within about a foot, so it reads that spot, and the software drops the weak signal that drifts in from the next one.
Boundary read point
long range
A long-range antenna reads several metres out, so one point covers a whole crossing: an aisle, a doorway, or the mouth of a work area.
Handheld read point
in hand
A handheld reader covers spots without a fixed antenna, and anywhere a person already has the part in hand. It uses the same tags and the same board, so a handheld scan stamps an arrival the way a fixed read does.
Location and stage, honest about the limits
Each reader sweeps its antennas many times a minute, so every zone it watches re-checks itself every few seconds; a part set down shows on the board after a few confirming reads, and a part lifted off clears after a short, deliberate pause.
A part's last-seen time and a one-tap recount close the find-it loop.
Passive RFID in a metal shop is never perfect on every pass, so the system expects that. It waits for confirming reads before it commits, and sends anything it is unsure about to an exceptions list for a person to settle.
Read decision log
ILLUSTRATIVE
Z03
-38 dBm
PT-0417 · read
Z03
-41 dBm
PT-0417 · confirm 2/3
Z03
-40 dBm
PT-0417 · present
Z04
-67 dBm
below floor · rejected
DOOR
-52 dBm
PT-9902 · passing
PT-0417 → present after 3 reads · Zone 03
A neighbouring zone leaks in weakly and is rejected below the RSSI floor. The doorway read is a pass-by.
One board the whole floor can read
Held at a stage
ILLUSTRATIVE
Inspection
Work Cell
Test
Exception · PT-0358 · no read 22 min · recount?
Recount · Zone 03 · operator confirmed · logged
Every part shows on a live board: its stage, where it is, and how long it has waited there. Parts that sit too long turn amber, then red, so a bottleneck is visible from across the room.
When a read looks wrong, the board flags it as an exception. A scan at the right zone sets it straight, and every correction is logged: who, when, and what changed. Open any part for its full history.
Measured on your floor, in writing
Passive RFID behaves differently in every building; metal, fixtures, and your part mix all change how tags read, so the numbers that matter (range, timing, tuning) are measured on your floor during the pilot.
Success criteria are agreed in writing before the pilot starts, so you watch it work on your own parts before you commit to a full rollout.
RFID Flow is advisory inventory tracking. It sits beside your quality and compliance records and never replaces them.
Pilot readout
MEASURED ON SITE
RSSI floor
set on site
Confirm reads
3
Absence timer
20 s
Port dwell
250 ms
Get a number for your floor
A 15-minute walkthrough in your vocabulary: your stages, your part numbers. We scope it to your floor and put the number in writing.