Any idea how to discriminate between receivers?

[The Keeper]

Hello all,

I'm having a lot of problems with dropouts on my 8m and 40m tags, and always have had problems. I added a second receiver inside the house, which helped a bit, and have been tweaking the discrimination, which helped a bit.

I'm starting to work on fixing some of the core infrastructure problems in my home automation system, and the RFID tags are on the list.

I think part of the problem is either with the closeness of the 40m RFID tags (they're within 20ft of both receivers) or the fact that the house is clad in aluminum siding, or both.

One option is for me to move one of the receivers out to the barn, where I have a serial-to-ethernet router. That'd be fine for the 40m tags, where I just need to know if they're in range or not. The problem is, I need to be able to determine the relative proximity of the 8m tag, which is in the dog's collar.

If I can figure out whether the 8m tag is being received inside the house, or being received inside the barn, I can figure out where the dog is. I'd even be willing to have separate devices for inside vs outside, to the point where I'd even be willing to deal with hacking the plug-in to support what I'm trying to do -- the 8m tag has a fixed name, so mangle the name slightly when it comes in on the second receiver, such that it looks like it's a different device.

Anyone have any comments?

Thanks,
Chris

[Michael McSharry]

Dont know what issue the CheaperRFID plugin is presenting to you, but xapmcsRFID can be run with an instance for each receiver so identification is implicit. Mixing 40M and 8M tags will inherently give you problems because the receiver automatically adjusts sensitivity based upon signal strength so a 40M tag will cause the sensitivity to be reduced and then the 8M tag will have a much harder time of being received.

[The Keeper]

*snort* The things the seller apparently doesn't even know... I had initially bought an 8m and two 40m, and when I was having problems, the seller offered to replace the "non-working" tags...

Well, I guess setting up a receiver in the barn would help, then, since the 8m tag won't reach that far when it's in the house.

Mind if I ask what's involved in setting up xap? I know you've been supporting that functionality for quite a while, but I've never really looked into it...

Thanks,
Chris

[Michael McSharry]

xAP is a communication protocol setup for automation and telemetry that uses the LAN as the physical layer. xAP nodes communicate with each other using this protocol. A typical Homeseeer plugin will communicate with Homeseer using the SDK defined by HST. One of the available Homeseer plugins is mcsXap what understands the xAP protocol and the SDK and provides a bridge between the two.

IP Port 3639 is reserved for xAP by the folks who manage the IP ports (e.g. 80=HTTP, 25=SMTP etc.) Multiple xAP applications can run on the same computer and Windows only allows one application to listen on any given port so an xAP hub is used to route all xAP traffic on the same computer. Every xAP application will transmit to port 3639 and the xAP hub will hear these messages and forward them to all the xAP applications on the same computer.

To use xAP with Homeseer you need mcsXap as the Homeseer plugin and a xAP hub such as xapmcsHub. This is the infrastructure. Beyond that there are xAP applications or xAP hardware devices that are added to provide the desired functionality. xapAutomation.org is a good starting point for the applications that come out of England. The ones I developed can be viewed from this message board.

The recent xAP applications that I developed have more information about integration with Homeseer. Something like xapmcsWebControl is an example. You can look at that manual and substitute RFID instead of WebControl for the application and the integration will still be the same. I do not recall what I had in the xapmcsRFID manual on this subject. There is also a xAP setup document in the xAP Library on the message board.

[sailwhatcom]

Hi Guys,

I would love to know what you see with the degraded 8m tag reception on the RSSI receivers when using a higher power tag. I use the RSSI receiver with numerous tag powers every day and do not have any trouble so I'm very curious...

Jeff

[Michael McSharry]

I was under the impression that the reciever had Auto Gain Control circuitry to dynamically adjust sensitivity. Apparently I was wrong. My experiment with a pair of 40 and 8 tags and a 9315 receiver showed no difference in reported sensitivity based upon the tag transmitting or not.

[The Keeper]

Ah, ok, thanks for the info on xAP, and thanks checking into that Michael.

I don't have an RSSI-enabled receiver at the moment, and I'm on the fence about which receiver I'll want to buy as my third unit. Is the RSSI information useful? I know what RSSI is, but knowing that I'm having so many reliability problems, I'm not sure if RSSI would help, or if it'd just make "guesses" worse.

[Michael McSharry]

The signal strength information for the unit that I have does not provide any useful information. The reading falls into a range when the transmitter is sufficiently close, but it has no relationship to how close the transmitter is. I get better results from the original model without the additional information. It could be a case of variation in the manufacturing lots since I have only a sample of three receivers.

[sailwhatcom]

During my testing of the 8315 vs 9315 it is clear that the 8315 is more sensitive (aka you get better range). You can see the results for yourself in the "forum" section of the Cliste site.

Cheers,
Jeff

[The Keeper]

Thanks for the info, guys! I'll certainly pick up another 8135, when I'm ready to move forward with that.

[The Keeper]

Anyone (maybe Dan?) know much about RF and how temperature affects the coils on the PCB? I'm actually starting to lean toward a heat problem (which would not be resolved by the addition of a third receiver)...

It just occurred to me that the problem I'm seeing with my tags (and others that see dropouts during the summer) is very likely a heat problem. It's common knowledge in this forum that cold temperatures seem to affect the button batteries themselves, but the heat thing doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, in the context of battery output.

Compound that with the fact that I only see tags drop when the sun is out, and almost never overnight (unless the batteries are just plain dying), and I'm wondering if the coils are heating and changing enough shape that it drifts outside of the sensitivity range of the extremely inexpensive 310MHz receiver.

So the next problem is, how do you combat such a phenomena...?

Chris