Is It Possible to Read TID and EPC Tags With a Single Command?

Would that mainly depend on a manufacturer's design?

—Name withheld

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To answer your question, I reached out to Sanjiv Dua, the CEO of RFID4U, a leading RFID training company. Sanjiv's firm trains people on the use of different types of readers. He says that Impinj has a proprietary command called FastID, which works only with Impinj readers and certain versions of its Monza chips. FastID can provide the Tag Identifier (TID), along with the Electronic Product Code (EPC). With other readers, sequencing the two commands programmatically will actually create one output, which is probably what you are looking to get. Here is a sample of the sequenced commands using the Impinj software development kit:

TagOpSequence seq = new TagOpSequence();

// Specify a target tag based on the EPC.
seq.TargetTag.MemoryBank = MemoryBank.Epc;
seq.TargetTag.BitPointer = BitPointers.Epc;
seq.TargetTag.Data = TagData.FromHexString(inventoryList.SelectedRows[0].Cells[0].Value.ToString());

TagReadOp readOp = new TagReadOp();
readOp.MemoryBank = MemoryBank.Epc;
// Add this tag read op to the tag operation sequence.
seq.Ops.Add(readOp);

TagReadOp readTIDOp = new TagReadOp();
readTIDOp.MemoryBank = MemoryBank.Tid;
seq.Ops.Add(readTIDOp);

// Add the tag operation sequence to the reader.

// The reader supports multiple sequences.
Reader.AddOpSequence(seq);

// Start the reader
Reader.Start();

I hope that answers your question.

—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal