• Date: 2010.
  • Company owner: VPI Diabetes Management.
  • Developed by Cisium, Inc.
  • Customers: hospitals.
  • Creators: Raúl Bartolomé Castro and others.
  • Raúl’s contribution: engineering manager and chief engineering of complete system.
  • Market: medical.
  • Product category: RF identification.

This is a customize solution for a mid range RFID. The purpose of this product is to detect and record automatically the attendance of field staff. For example it good be used construction workers in a construction area, home nurses add patient site, or field staff visiting any other customer site.

The system consistent of a control unit mounted in the field and ID units that are worn by the field staff. Each ID unit has a unique Identifier. The system uses a proprietary protocol and registers ID, IN and OUT  timestamp of the field personal and passes the information to the internet to a data collector server for further processing.

The main components of the system are Microchip PIC16F873, a RTC PCF8583 from NXP and the transceiver CC1100. It was done with SMD technology in a 2 layers PCB.

The C1100 is a Highly Integrated MultiCh RF Transceiver Designed for Low-Power Wireless Apps. It is a low-cost sub-1 GHz transceiver designed for very low-power wireless applications. The circuit is mainly intended for the ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) and SRD (Short Range Device) frequency bands at 315, 433, 868, and 915 MHz, but can easily be programmed for operation at other frequencies in the 300-348 MHz, 400-464 MHz and 800-928 MHz bands.

The RF transceiver is integrated with a highly configurable baseband modem. The modem supports various modulation formats and has a configurable data up to 500 kBaud.

CC1100 provides extensive hardware support for packet handling, data buffering, burst transmissions, clear channel assessment, link quality indication, and wake-on-radio.

The main operating parameters and the 64-byte transmit/receive FIFOs of CC1100 can be controlled via an SPI interface.

Features

RF Performance

  • High sensitivity (–111 dBm at 1.2 kBaud, 868 MHz, 1% packet error rate)
  • Low current consumption (14.4 mA in RX, 1.2 kBaud, 868 MHz)
  • Programmable output power up to +10 dBm for all supported frequencies
  • Excellent receiver selectivity and blocking performance
  • Programmable data rate from 1.2 to 500 kBaud
  • Frequency bands: 300-348 MHz, 400-464 MHz and 800-928 MHz

Analog Features

  • 2-FSK, GFSK, and MSK supported as well as OOK and flexible ASK shaping
  • Suitable for frequency hopping systems due to a fast settling frequency synthesizer: 90µs settling time
  • Automatic Frequency Compensation (AFC) can be used to align the frequency synthesizer to the received centre frequency
  • Integrated analog temperature sensor

Digital Features

  • Flexible support for packet oriented systems: On-chip support for sync word detection, address check, flexible packet length, and automatic CRC handling
  • Efficient SPI interface: All registers can be programmed with one “burst” transfer
  • Digital RSSI output
  • Programmable channel filter bandwidth
  • Programmable Carrier Sense (CS) indicator
  • Programmable Preamble Quality Indicator (PQI) for improved protection against false sync word detection in random noise
  • Support for automatic Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) before transmitting (for listen-before-talk systems)
  • Support for per-package Link Quality Indication (LQI)

Leave a Reply