Microsoft, RFID Discovery, Grydd, SparkFun: RFID News Roundup

Published: May 16, 2024

New RFID technology Being Used by Brook Taverner

RFID Discovery has implemented its conveyor belt portal solution at Brook Taverner, enabling the company to check up to 25,000 garments in less than 60 minutes.

Using RFID tags fitted into garments during manufacture, the portal solution gives real-time visibility of stock and removing the need for manual checks, according to officials from both companies.

Brook Taverner’s senior operations manager Colin Seward stated RFID Discovery’s conveyor portal has “revolutionized” their  goods-in verification process and substantially increased the accuracy of warehouse inventory.

“It used to take us three hours to carry out manual spot checks on a typical shipment of up to 25,000 garments, inherently introducing potential errors,” said Seward. “Now we can efficiently validate whether all expected items are present in less than one hour, savings us both time and money.”

Grydd Launches AI-Driven Supply Chain & Logistics Ecosystem

Grydd recently unveiled an advanced suite of AI applications, leveraging the latest machine learning techniques alongside massive shipment data to provide increased visibility for users.

The company, a provider of AI-powered supply chain and logistics software, updates five of its offerings in the Collaboration Hub AI. Officials said partners in the extended supply chain can now leverage shared intelligence to collaboratively solve issues, replan as needed and track performance metrics on a single dashboard.

Among the upgrades include AI drawing upon historical factors to generate 30-90 day demand forecasts, monitoring of databases for unusual or faulty behavior increasing the capabilities of the ecosystem and maximizing truck capacity and container utilization, reducing waste across all modes of transport.

SparkFun Updates RFID Tag Reader

SparkFun launched a new high-performance RFID tag reader JADAK’s ThingMagic M7E-Hecto, capable of scanning up to 300 tags per second.

The RFID scanning board replaces the company’s earlier JADAK ThingMagic M6E-Nano based version, which could deliver a scanning rate of up to 150 tags per second and write tags in just 80 milliseconds. The upgrade to JADAK’s ThingMagic M7E-Hecto module brings with it a major performance boost for scanning and an external antenna offers a read range of up to 16 feet.

The company highlighted the new revision is the addition of a USB Type-C connector, which can power the reader and delivers a data connection via a USB to UART bridge. The board can be powered from a 3.3V power supply via unpopulated breadboard-friendly 0.1″ pin headers, which include serial connectivity and access to four input/output pins.

Microsoft Investing $3.3B in Artificial Intelligence Hub

Microsoft recently announced a broad investment package designed to strengthen the role of Wisconsin as a hub for AI-powered economic activity, innovation, and job creation.

These investments include $3.3B in cloud computing and AI infrastructure, the creation of the country’s first manufacturing-focused AI co-innovation lab, and an AI skilling initiative to equip more than 100,000 of the state’s residents with essential AI skills.

By the end of 2026, the company will expand its national cloud and AI infrastructure capacity through the development of a state-of-the-art datacenter campus in Mount Pleasant, WI. This new infrastructure will help enable companies in Wisconsin and across the country to develop, deploy and use the world’s most advanced cloud services and AI applications to grow, modernize and improve their products and enterprises.

Along with building a physical data center, Microsoft will partner with Gateway Technical College to build a Data Center Academy to train and certify more than 1,000 students in five years to work in the new data center and IT sector jobs created in the area.

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