I've written some Perl modules for interfacing with RFID readers, and
I thought I'd post here to see if anybody has any thoughts or
feedback. They're on CPAN as RFID::*, and we have a Web page at:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~wherefid/code/rfid-perl/
Thanks for any comments, criticism, ideas, etc. If you're interested
in these modules in particular, please consider joining the rfid-perl
mailing list; information is on the above Web page.
Here's a summary of the modules:
The rfid-perl modules aim to provide a consistent interface to RFID
readers, so that code can be written that will work with many types
and brands of readers. Part of that goal is making it straightforward
to write new drivers.
Currently, we support two readers (Matrics and Alien), and much of the
code to support both the readers is factored out into base
classes. Each of the driver classes took about a week and 1,000-2,000
lines of code to write and test. We suspect that adding other drivers
will take similar amounts of code and time.
We also support creating and parsing EPC tags, according to the
specifications from EPCGlobal.
This is currently beta-quality software, but we're using it on a
day-to-day basis without problems. It is tested on Linux and Windows,
and is written in pure Perl, so it should run anywhere Perl does.
----ScottG.
