How to Use the ThingMagic URA
Posted by Suzanne Smiley on Jan 03, 2018
Introduction
This is part three of a three-part series that walks through unboxing, setting up, and connecting to the ThingMagic M6 RFID Reader and ThingMagic Izar RFID Reader. The third video in the series also discusses navigating through the ThingMagic URA Program.
[Audio Transcription Below]
In this video, we are going to walk through the process of reading and writing tags with the ThingMagic Universal Reader Assistant program, also known as URA. If you have successfully downloaded the URA program and connected to your reader, then we will begin on the URA home page.
Set Up
Once you have connected to your reader, click “Read” and place one or more RFID tags within range of your reader’s antenna.
Five columns will appear on your data sheet:
- The Pound Column, which is the order in which the tags were read.
- The EPC Column, which is the memory area of the tag.
- The Timestamp Column, which is the last time the tags were read.
- The RSSI Column, which is the receive signal strength of the tag response measured in decibels. The closer to 0 the RSSI is, the stronger your signal. You can test this by moving tags closer and farther away from the reader.
- And lastly, the Read Count Column, which is the amount of times that the tag has been read.
You can alter the read power in the Performance Tuning section between 5 and 31.5 dB. Read power is directly related to read range. The higher the read power, the longer the read range.
You can also change the way the tags appear on your data sheet by clicking on “Write EPC” on the top of your screen.
Select either “first tag to respond”, or the tag you have previously selected, and then select how you would like the EPC to be displayed on the data sheet, and then simply press “Read” and make your changes. When encoding RFID tags, you will need to make sure that you always use 24 hexadecimal characters. This means that you must use 24 characters that are between A and F and 0 and 9.
Once a tag is successfully encoded, you will notice that the changes will immediately be seen on the data sheet.
Conclusion
That concludes our tutorial of the ThingMagic Universal Reader Assistance program. We discussed how to read and write tags as well as some of the different settings and features that the Universal Reader Assistance program offers for your application. For more information on all things RFID, please visit our blog or our RFID resources page, and as always if you have any questions, send us an email or give us a call.
To read more about ThingMagic Products, check out the links below!