What’s the Cheapest Method of Identifying Football Helmets Via RFID?

We are collecting approximately 13,000 football helmets from various youth football clubs around the country, and we need a way to quickly associate helmet ID information with an RFID tag so that the collected helmets can later be found, analyzed and tested. What is the best and cheapest way to do this with radio frequency identification? This would be a one-time event, and not a continuing program.

—Name withheld

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I’m unsure what you mean by the “helmet ID information,” but if each helmet had a unique bar code, you could easily write a simple program that would take the serial number in the bar code and write it to the RFID transponder. If the bar code didn’t contain serialized data, or if there were only an alphanumeric serial number, then you would need to add a few digits to the bar code for each helmet, or type the serial number into a software program to create a unique ID that could then be written to the tag.

There are companies that offer software for associating items or cases with serial numbers in Electronic Product Code (EPC) tags, but there are also RFID professionals who could write a simple program to do the job for you.

—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal