The tipping point for RFID – Journal Live 2009 thanks to the ODIN engineers
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Fri, May 08, 2009
Back in 2003 I was visiting a friend of mine who was Chief of Police at Dayton and he told me about kits they used for CSI and communication work. A few months later I saw a surgical kit that was reused with items costing several thousand dollars each inside. Then I talked with folks at my old hosting company who sent of back-up tapes off site in special boxes. Another buddy at the US Secret Service told me about trip-kits that went out in advance of Presidential visits. Soon every box I looked at from railroad cars to self-storage containers, to medical cabinets looked like the same RFID opportunity. But the technology wasn't ready for the problem. I knew if someone could solve the problem it would deliver great business value. In true John Boyd "analysis-synthesis" fashion the SMART container was born.
Last week ODIN won the biggest award in RFID for finally making the technology a reality. In beating out well funded venture companies, and publicly traded behemoths ODIN leveraged a unique combination of engineering expertise and our role as the RFID innovation factory for real world solutions. The Self-Inventorying SMART container is changing the RFID industry because it solves the biggest problem with the technology and in the supply chain. Rather than being a series of components that takes weeks to install and integrate, and requires a degree in physics to make work it's a self contained unit. The SMART Container is built on our Blackbird technology that allows the entire system to be deployed in under 60 seconds. Configuration and set-up is easy enough for a junior-high school student. Now a box anywhere in the world can be inventoried with the click of a mouse.
Many folks had the idea of nesting passive tags inside a box with active tags or satellite on the outside, but it took the engineers at ODIN three years to make this a reality. I remember reading about the Wooley patent and seeing one of Craig Harmon's "dads and grand dads" PowerPoint's and wondering why no one had made anything even close a reality yet and what innovation was required to get it done. The more our engineers worked on it the more I realized it was an incredibly difficult problem to solve, and even more difficult to do it with the unique ODIN goals of making it fast, easy and accurate to deploy.
The ODIN team along with our partners MTI Labs overcame four crucial challenges that no one in the industry was able to surmount:
- A whole new RFID reader & antenna system
- A communication array using satellite, active RFID, cellular or wifi
- An intelligent configurator that ensures easy set-up and accurate reads
- Portable power management
About 18 months ago we started working with the US Department of Defense on making our commercial grade SMART container military grade. While the military didn't need all the things we designed in for the commercial world, like deploying in 60 seconds, WiFi and USB downloads, or one year battery life, the military needed ruggedness and simplicity. We've spent a lot of time with both commercial and military constituencies over the past four years to make sure what we released commercially would change the industry. The result was evident in ODIN winning the most prestigious award in RFID - RFID Journal's Best in Show.
Sure I came up with the original idea and concept and my name is on the first patent, but a great idea is only valuable if it turns into a product. The real thanks goes to former and current ODIN engineers who made this happen over the past four years, thank you for your innovation and expertise: Daniel Engels, Chris Fennig, Nick Hilliard, Chetan Karani, Gordon Fraser, Kiely Faroe, Dave Vetter, Farid Hassani, Adam Bennett, Luke Waidmann, Hagan Colo, Charles Schlosser, Scott Decker, John Kelvie, Bela Vizy, Mark Chapman, David Wei, Kevin MacDonald, Austin Kindred, Christen Sweeney, and for helping refine ideas the input from Billy McManus, Steve Colo, Billy at USSS, Steve Miles , Nick Tsougas, General Bill Tuttle, General Tony Robertson, my buddies at Team Two in VA Beach and all the men and women serving our country who put in their two cents - thank you for your time and belief in the ODIN team.