tagging and tracking

I am working on a project with my Raspberry Pi. I want to be able to create a massive multi player board game that can take up a large room (such as a church hall) the board game will be a war game in style with a number of models with different stats and requirements.

I would like to tag each one with a RFID tag on the base that will detail names and stats. I then would like to have a number of receivers that will be dotted around the room and by looking at the strength of the connection of the tag to multiple readers I hope that I could calculate its location within a room.

The next stage is to take all this information and map it into the Raspberry Pi and then host this onto a domain that allows people to interact with a map and find details about each model and track the progress of the game.

I am not sure those what tags and readers I should look at and what is the best way to get started.

here is the link to my blog which shows an example of my 3D models.

http://masstemplate.uk/blog/archive.php?cat=times

0 rew over 9 years ago

What I know about RFID tags is that the manufacturers get it to work at distances of up to say 20cm. Then they say: if you are not within 20cm of a reader, your tag cannot be read by anyone. The hackers show that this is not the case. With smart antenna arrays and things like that, you can read tags at much larger distances.

But alas, this is not possible with the standard RFID tags and readers.

Another thing is: the standard readers will simply report: " I've seen tag XYZ", and say nothing about the signal strength.
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0 Former Member over 9 years ago in reply to rew

Okay well would there be another way of track location in a room and gather information such as stats other than RFID ?? or maybe link with RFID with location tracking..... ??
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0 Former Member over 9 years ago in reply to Former Member

Roger is correct - RFID is Near-Field Communication (NFC). The usual way to find a location without GPS is to triangulate on multiple radio signals. If you had (for the size of the "average" church hall) seven identical Wireless Access Points, you could measure the relative strength of each signal and use a truth table (or some other algorithm) to define location. If it sounds complex it can be.
Your idea of using RFID/NFC is the easiest to implement, since each station would define a location. If you had Bluetooth 4.1+ devices to define a location you could use NFC tags on each person to identify them. If you placed the tags on the same plane as the receiver (say, on the floor and the players shoes) you could use a system similar to that used by cell phones.
The other most frequently used models are transponders (with an identifying character string) or touch sensors (acoustic wave, resistive, or capacitive) although these would get pretty expensive.
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0 clem57 over 9 years ago

How many pieces will you track? how detail the location? Will there be a map or many maps?
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0 Former Member over 9 years ago in reply to clem57

We could be talking about 200 pieces per person and high detail on the location so that the hope is that you could click on two model on the map and calculate the distance between them rather than physical have to. Just one map. I am working on an example at the moment.
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0 clem57 over 9 years ago in reply to Former Member

I am thinking of a x-y movement of the reader over the pieces to read rfid tags as it passes over. This would give position relative to values of the x-y plane.
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