Setup Guide

Concepts (Performing an Inventory)
adjust Q or just try again and let the tags roll a different random number. From your
perspective as a user of the reader, these details don't usually matter (we adjust Q for you
automatically) but they can be useful to know sometimes if you are trying to optimize
performance.
Concepts (Reading / Writing other data)
The Gen2 protocol is strongly oriented around the use case of rapidly reading the data in Bank
1 of Memory, the EPC. In supply chain applications there can be hundreds of tags moving past
a read point and the reader needs to read them all as they go by.
Reading data in other banks of memory or programming tag memory builds off of the
protocol we use for isolating tags and it extends it, allowing a “conversation” to take place with
a tag that has been isolated, or “singulated”.
To read User memory for example, the reader first isolates a tag with an inventory, and then
uses the handle from the tag as part of a sequence of commands to get the User data.
Programming is done in a similar manner.
In the Thinkify reader, we allow you to specify a number of “descriptors” that tell the reader
what additional actions, if any, to take when it reads a tag. Descriptors can be used to Read
additional memory areas, Write to memory, Lock and Unlock tag memory, and Kill tags.
This is a very powerful approach. By using Select commands (called “masking”) as part of the
inventory we can quickly specify that we are interested in performing an operation on just one,
some, or all of the tags presented to the reader.
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