Hans Turck‘s BLident system, which is available in the UK from Turck Banner, is believed to be the world’s first modular RFID system with built-in I/O capability. With this system, users may add additional I/O modules - up to eight channels of RFID, plus additional discrete or analogue I/O make up a single node on the network. Built on the ISO15693 13.56MHz HF standard, BLident can be integrated into existing platforms, and supports Profibus-DP, DeviceNet , Modbus-TCP, ProfiNET and EtherNet/IP. Standard non-programmable gateways and CoDeSys programmable gateways are available with either IP20 or IP67 protection rating.
The new product series is based on the modular I/O system BL67 (field mountable) and BL20 (control cabinet mounting) and consists of data carriers, read-write heads, connection technology and gateways. In addition to the standard data carriers which are rated for temperatures up to 120ºC, BLident also operates with high temperature tags up to 210ºC, which do not require cooling before reading or writing. Curing paint in car manufacturing is one example where the data carriers can be used, as they can pass through the oven on the vehicle skids.
The tags are available with EEPROM and FRAM memory, where the latter allows an almost unlimited number or read and write operations. Many conventional RFID systems are only capable of reading and writing tags statically, whereas the BLident systems can read and write ‚on-the-fly‘. With a read-write time of 0.5 ms/byte, this RFID system is one of the fastest systems available on the market.
In determining the set-up for an application, three factors have to be traded against each other: the distance of the tags from the read-write heads, the speed at which the object can move past them and the data transfer rate. Turck provides a very useful online configurator, which can be used to simulate an application in order to find the optimum set- up. Check this out at www.turck.de/en