 All right, well, this is tagging your world with RFID, or how to annoy your friends, family, and pets, which is something I'm a bit of an expert on. You can find me on Twitter at adicontius. You can also follow my live tweet stream that has extra information, links to details about RFID tags, that sort of thing, at hashtag rubyRFID. So I work in laboratory information management software. Basically what we do is I personally attract vials and robotic freezers using RFID tags. It's freaking cool. It's a lot of fun. And the company that I work for, JMI Laboratory, is we actually test the antibiotics and find out which antibiotics are developing, basically bacteria is developing a resistance to. We've been doing this for 15 years. We pass the information off to the FDA. We pass the information off to the European Health Agency. And then, of course, we help drug companies develop better antibiotics as a side effect. Lots of data to sift through. It's a lot of fun. And while I'm up here, I also wanted to promote Ruby for Good. I'm sure some of you have already heard about it. If you haven't, you can visit rubyforgood.org. Also talk to Sean Marcia or talk to Chris Sexton. It's basically a weekend hackathon where you're helping nonprofits and open source. And we go out. And last year, we had kittens, because we worked with the Humane Society this upcoming year, where there's going to be red pandas. We're going to actually be at the Smithsonian Mason Research Center in Virginia. And it should be pretty interesting. So a couple of personal things about me. I think I'll understand what I'm doing later on with some of the hardware. For those that don't know me, by knowing that I'm a little bit of a weird dude, I tried to bring back this 40-spin stash that did not work out. I generally hike in a kilt in crocs. I was a professional chef. Not before IT. I quit IT, went to culinary school, became a chef, came back, because that turns out that really sucks. I go to a lot of punk rock shows with my daughter, who is 18, and surprisingly not too embarrassed by me. I'm Batman. So I work remote. One of the big reasons is because I have a, this is what I was known for when I worked in an office, is I was the person that did these horrible things to their office maze. But here's the thing. I didn't actually have that many coworkers. So it was mostly just this guy. We're still dear friends, for the most part. Random factoid. So this is a photo outside of the plane on the way here. Absolutely beautiful. Absolutely fascinating to me. And I've done quite a bit of traveling. But at the age of 38, this is actually the first time I've ever been on a plane. This is also the first time I've ever spoken to a group this large. So I figured it's a whole thing at first. So let's actually move on to what is RFID? So RFID is a radio frequency identification. It's the wireless use of electromagnetic fields to transfer data. You can do this for automatically identifying tracking tags that are attached to objects. That's kind of the Wikipedia definition there. But really no explanation of RFID or magnetic fields and that sort of thing is going to be complete without talking about Tesla. I'm sorry, Nikolai Tesla. Tesla was without a question the greatest geek that ever lived. And actually, if you're following that tweet stream, there's a link to an explanation of why he was the greatest geek to ever live. So in 1894, Nikolai Tesla used resonant inductive coupling to wirelessly light up phosphorescent and incandescent lamps. Resonant inductive coupling is the near field wireless transmission of electrical energy between two magnetically coupled coils. Resonant energy transfer is the operating principle behind passive RFID tags, which you're going to see here today. Wireless charging, which I think a lot of people have probably adopted at this point, as well as contactless smart cards, which if you were working in the government, I'm sure you've dealt with. So thank you, Nikolai. There's a lot of practical uses for RFID and a lot that many people in here have already used, such as races. Race timing of the bibs, as well as shoe tags, have become very common, very popular. TVDK asks, I don't know why I put this one here. These are going to be gone in like a year. Authentication, doors, computer systems, medical cards. This is going more and more and more common. Toe collection, I'm sure that quite a few people here have EZPass or whatever is common down here in Texas. And asset tracking, this is the bread and butter of the RFID industry. This is what has driven prices down. It used to cost several dollars to buy a single RFID tag, not that long ago, and now you can buy a paper tag for 13 cents on a giant roll because companies like Walmart and Best Buy and all these large big box stores are using it. Manufacturers are using it to track their assets. It's easy, it's cheap, and it's starting to become more and more accessible to the rest of us, not just to those industrial purposes. And getting back to access tracking for a moment, that's what I get to do, which is really fun. Because you're like, oh, we have a bunch of vials of MRSA. Cool, don't touch that. And actually, there's a couple of other random uses that I wanted to mention. One is wireless access points and smart dust. There's a thing called the Monza X2K. It's a UHF RFID reader. Sorry, that's not it, ignore that. That it holds about 9,000 bits. It can actually be attached to a circuit board and or to a microcontroller and can be used to pass information to the processor, even if the device is turned off. So where is this getting used and why is this handy? So Microsoft is actually starting to use them in some of their tablets. And the idea is, you go into the store, you purchase your product without anybody really even noticing that it's occurring, it gets activated as you're purchasing it. And a signal goes that turned off device and lets it know this was a legitimate purchase, this is now under warranty and joy. However, if you take it and you try to walk out of the store with it, you'll never get to turn it on. That's kind of cool. It's also kind of scary that you can wirelessly transfer information to a turned off computer. There's also a thing called SmartDust, which are tiny RFID chips that are actually used to create wireless sensor networks. These are starting to be used as neural networks to control artificial robotic limbs. I mean, this is wild stuff. And then of course, I think most people are probably familiar with RFID ear tags that are common industrial farming, as well as with your pets. That's a fairly common use. And also people, they're used to track movements of personnel within a building at doors, in elevators, that sort of thing. Which every time I've had this conversation somewhere, of course it's gonna, it brings up that question. There's the privacy question, there's this question. So I did link the Google search to find these. It's great, just pages after pages of Google images. So RFID is cheap, it's becoming more and more common, but it's still not necessarily that understood by the wide populace. The range for reading one of these embeddable RFID chips is centimeters, not feet, not even inches. So the concerns that you might be being tracked by RFID tags are a little bit blunt on a proportion. There's still certain reasons to be cautious. However, the reality is that when you're running around with these networked computers that are getting your location from space in your pockets, I'd be a little more concerned about that. It's a lot easier. But, this is a great picture. I just wanna say, if this still really is a concern for you, let me just give you some advice here. Do, do, do, do, do. Oops, oh that went tiny. Okay, so here we have an RFID tag. As we can see it read, no problem whatsoever. Find yourself some tinfoil. Go ahead. Put on the tinfoil hat. All right, so limitations. There are certain disadvantages to RFID tags. I'm sure that people that are aware of I-beacons and other kind of competing technologies, there's areas where they're just quite a bit better. There's physical limitations. You can't read through aluminum foil. So how are you gonna track people? It's difficult to read them through liquids. There are, there's a thing called signal collision. So if you try to read too many tags in a single spot, things go bad. Just as if you have two readers that are trying to read a single tag, it doesn't know who to communicate to. This causes issues. Now the higher end you get with your hardware, they're more like collision detection there is and the more it works against it. And then of course standards. For the most part, there are standards. Generally when you scan an RFID tag, such as a UHF Gen2 tag, you can look at the first three numbers of the tag and immediately know the manufacturer if you bought it in the US. Everywhere else is just, who knows? And there are privacy concerns. There's a lot of people that have been working on this and one of my personal favorite are zombie tags. So zombie tags are really cool. So you go into Best Buy, Best Buy uses these by the way and say you buy a high end computer. It has an RFID tag in the box that gets picked up at the front of the store. Now you can imagine the potential security issue with that of there's an RFID that might be linked to a product. You leave the store. Is it possible for somebody to pick that up from a distance and know that in your car is say a new MacBook Pro? This is a concern and this is a concern privacy advocates have and I certainly have had as well. So they came up with zombie tags. So as you purchase the product, the tag is said told you're dead and it no longer responds. It might actually pick up a magnetic wave and it will resonate, but it won't respond unless it gets a very specific code in which case it goes, oh sweet, I'm alive again. And of course, why would you do that? Because somebody might return it to a store and you have to add it back into your store ready for sale. I mean, come on, that's awesome. So why Ruby? And why am I just like rambling on about RFID tags and all this goofiness and tinfoil hats. So there's a bit of a lower technical debt. When you looked at this industry 10 years ago, it was like, you got to get your electrical engineer in the room to help you write your software. It was ridiculous. There are libraries now, there are ways of accessing it. The manufacturers are getting better at this. So they're exposing APIs, they're exposing web sockets that makes the language like Ruby perfect. And in my industry personally, where I'm dealing with scientists who oftentimes already know Python, it's not that big of a jump. And I can write a script for them, pass it off and go here, enjoy, and they can change it if they need to in the future. And Ruby makes me happy. It really does. I was a PHP dev for many, many, many years. I was dead inside. And then I found a Ruby. And it brings me absolute joy. It really does. So this is a bit of a high level overview. If you want to talk more in depth, if you want to talk about the frequency ranges for UHF tags versus HF versus NFC tags, I'll be more than happy to tonight. After Matt's talks, let's grab a cup of coffee. We'll spend all the time you want. If you need something written, of course, just buy me a beer and I'll just write it for you. That's fine. Let's actually get to the fun part. Let's talk about the not so practical uses. So this is Betty. Betty is my dog and I am so thankful to the RubyConf organizers for doing all this, but they did say that no, I could not bring her today. So this will be Betty for this demonstration. So Betty has recently, she signed up for Twitter. She's been tweeting a little bit. It's difficult, no thumbs. Oh God. So this is real. Okay, you know, people go and we create goofy things when we throw them up as a demo and a talk. I have an RFID antenna by my back door and I have this software running on a Raspberry Pi because I'm a goof nut because I will let my dog out and I'll go sit down and go, I'm gonna get this test passed real quick and then I'll go let her back in. Then like an hour goes by and I hear the scratching and she gives me that look of just you've betrayed me. I feel terrible. I love my dog. She's absolutely wonderful. So I had to come up with a different solution. And so basically what we have here instead is let's go ahead and run betty.rb. I'm now watching the door for betty. Betty around her collar, the real betty, not this betty, has an RFID chip. So when betty goes outside, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew. Pretty sure that picked it up. Oh my God, you didn't do this to me, did you? Hardware talking, that'd be great. Oh then, I wrote a failsafe in there. Whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew. Really? Yeah, that could be it actually. That's not working. Let me examine real quick. Like I said, hardware talks. Okay, I'm talking to it, that's fine. Let's actually go back here. So I'm gonna just sock it. Okay, that tag works. Well, you're dead to me. So, if betty had not betrayed me, what would have occurred and I will just, I'll do a proof of concept here. I'll just go to the page where we can find this. She has been basically tweeting me and let me, I'm not logged in here, never mind. So she's been tweeting me, letting me know, Adam on my outside, please don't forget me. If you visit that website, you will actually visit her Twitter feed. You'll be able to see the past tweets because I'm sloppy. And when I let her back in, it actually just goes ahead and it lets me know how long she's been out. This is the code. If somebody notices why it doesn't work now, feel free to let me know after the fact. We're just basically, we're observing a web socket. That's all we're doing. And then we have a conditional there where we're looking for betty. If we're finding betties RFID tag, we're performing one of two actions. This is one of the reasons I love Ruby. It's just so quick to throw these things out and or break them. Let's move on to the internet of things. I don't like this phrase. I really don't. I mean, this is like such a buzzword. Everybody's into this. And so Julie and Chil on an episode of Ruby Rose was quoted as saying, why should your fridge be internet connected? Because it could tell you that you've run out of eggs but it probably doesn't know that you stopped eating eggs months ago. I mean, what a great point. There's no reason to have a smart fridge. That's why I built a smart trash can, which will work. So, oh my God, you better work. So here's the idea. I'm not gonna switch, I'm just gonna go and start up my smart trash can. Thank you very much, smart trash can. And there's my smart trash can. So I have just gone to the store and I've deleted my test data from last night. And I have, say I wanna log these items so that in the future, I'll know when I run out. I mean, why else would you use this smart trash can, right? All right, so I bought several items with me today. This is, I mean, direct from my house. This is representation of the things that I usually have around. I have, of course, some taco shells. We have some mason jar covers, because I can. I dropped soup. I had something else. Ginseng tea, love tea. And, so you're stool softener. What? So we've scanned our items. I actually, I have a little API connection here that goes up, looks up the barcodes and pulls in the items. I'll show the code for that, I promise. But now, we've stocked our, oh, by the way, does anybody notice the iPhone up there, the 4G cover? That's the taco shells? I don't know why. I submitted a request to them. Not my problem. So as your week goes on, and you're ready to, you know, you go through your food, you've taken all hundred stool softeners, that sort of thing, all you have to do is throw your items away. In your smart trash can, you better work. I am not even joking. Oh, oh, oh, oh, no, no, no, I took the wrong one. Look at that. There you go. And now we've disposed all, and now we have a shopping list and anybody can view the list from a web browser. Your loved ones can be out shopping and go, oh, he had that stool softener problem again and they can just go ahead and pick them up. Which that's what loved ones are for. Yeah, I've never talked to a loved one before. So that was the trash can demo. It was actually, the code for it's very simple once again, just listening to a web socket and performing an action in an active record and also hitting this weird funky API that I found someplace that apparently doesn't work completely. Somebody pointed out to me when I had actually discussed this that if you wanna take this a step further, you could actually get RFID bracelets, give them to people and find out who's the most wasteful in your house because there's no better way to win over your family than by tagging them and then harassing them. So there's lots of other things that you can do with RFID. Personally for me, I'm not the best dresser and I've been accused of playing golf because of my bad choices. So I want to come out with a better way to deal with this. So I have an RFID scanner in my bedroom because I'm that guy and it's a fashion portal. Once again, very simple, we're observing a web socket. I'm actually not going to, I'm actually missing the original portal I was gonna bring so I'm not gonna bother with the twice in a row situation but we are going to discuss kind of a pick me up, how to deal with your special clothes for special occasions which I don't know about the rest of you but I live a very rich fantasy life and I personally, I enjoy being entertained and I enjoy it when I can get put into an excellent mood first thing in the morning. So I have a list of clothing, they're rated based on different uses, I don't know, tuxedo, lab coat and so basically the end result of this, let me actually get off of this now. I'm gonna switch this again. Is when I get up in the morning and I grab my clothes and I have a special purpose I am going to get psyched up about it. So like I said, I work for a lab, you go and you put on your lab coat. I mean, you know you're gonna kick ass that day. When you're walking out like that and to say, you know, you get off and you have an event after. I really thought I had cut those down a little bit, sorry. Oh, I'm sure Evan, you wanna go ahead and guess what this was gonna do? I will do one more and then I will stop feeding on this dead horse because it entertains. I was up in the hotel room like all weekend just playing and having fun with it. And my last one was I know that this tie looks good. Good Lord. Once again, simple, same pattern. We're listening to a web socket. I have been, like I said, there's been some information tweeted out because there's a lot of different devices out there. You can get RFID readers now that are $200 range. Not this setup, but you can get cheap working RFID readers on Alibaba, several other sources. And like I said before, one of the things I didn't cover is I didn't cover writing. I would love to talk to anybody that's interested in that. I did not talk about password locking, kill commands. Didn't cover any of that because the reality is RFID has its own conferences. It's a huge topic and it's just too much to go into. But what I want to do is I want to spark your imagination. This language, the happiness that comes with it, I think you can spark creativity. And I think it gives us an opportunity to, instead of beating our heads against the wall, we can explore and we can have fun and we can entertain ourselves when we get up in the morning. So I'm hoping that what everybody takes away from this is that they kind of see there's all this stuff out there that you can go play with and you can make anything that you want. However, I do realize, I said this was about harassing, I'm sorry, not harassing, that's horrible. This was about annoying your pets and your family and your loved ones. Now, okay, admittedly, having this music playing here, that annoys your loved ones at home. The pets, I don't think she's dead to me. But what about your friends? So I want to tell you a story and I actually want to invite you to explore some of the possibilities here a little bit more. This is Dana, Dana Scully. Don't look at me, I didn't name it. This is Coraline Ada M. Keys, Teddy Bear, that she brought with her from Chicago. Dana's missing, by the way. So if after Matz's talk, if anybody wants a little something to do and you're not leaving tonight, this is your starter card, Coraline. Grab some people, I'll give you this barcode scanner. As you reveal the correct RFID tags, it will give you the next clue. I hope for your sake that you get them all. So I think with that, and everyone heard that threat, I think that's it. So thanks for letting me talk, if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Does anybody want a foil hat? It depends on the kinds of tags. The higher end tags have like a 0.01% failure rate. These type of tags, the paper one's like a place on my head. Probably somewhere in the 85% range. So generally speaking, what you do is you would load these into like a, I see Brady makes an RFID printer. You start printing the spool, it'll read the tag first, write a corresponding barcode to the tag, verify that it operates and continue printing out. Otherwise you can black it out and you know the tag's bad and you just don't use it. No, I am. Yeah, it's NFC. So it's in a different range than I've been showing up here. NFC is really interesting, but it has a range of a few inches. I can actually, the tag that's in Betty, who's dead to me, can be read from about 30 feet away with this equipment in theory, I guess not, or not. So there's a big difference there. But yeah, NFC's great. I mean, there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with it and definitely a lot of fun. If you have an Android phone, it's even more fun, so. Those, I'm sorry, are those? Oh, those are tiles, these are iBeacons. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Talk to Chris Sexton. Oh, the antennas are like 300 each and the reader itself is 15 to 1600. Yeah, this is industrial equipment. This is not home equipment. So I shouldn't like cover that. There is cheaper play equipment out there. And in fact, actually, if you have a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or something of that nature, there are now UHF Gen 2 shields that you can get for them, which is like 50 bucks, which is a little cheaper. They can take a bit of a beating. Most of that comes down to the casing. So one of the things that you find with RFID is things like antenna shape play a big role, which limits how you can package them. You can't mount them to metal as well. So they usually have to be, they're usually backed on paper or they're backed on paper that is then sealed inside of plastic. Betty's, okay, she really is going. So Betty is wearing a fireproof RFID tag and as well as the real Betty, because I don't know why. They put them on steel beams in case they get crushed, they'll survive. I mean, they're usually used in industrial applications where you might see a construction site, piles and piles and piles of beams everywhere. They put RFID tags on them. And they'll go through and they'll read a pile and they'll know exactly what they have and they'll have the GPS coordinates for it and now they have their inventory. So they have to take a beating and those tags in particular last, I think they're guaranteed the last 20 years, but I would suspect they'd probably at least last 50. So yeah, when several tags are trying to respond at the same time, you're gonna get a signal collision. Generally it comes down to the reader, gets to deal with that. Industrial readers like this, I can read about 100 tags at a time within a span of, I don't know, like 500 milliseconds. With lower end, like, hobbyist type readers, you might be able to read five at a time. And it's all about sorting through that. You know, it's like packet collision, similar concept. On the other side of that, if it's caused from two readers reading the same tag, you just screw it up the placement of the readers. You're gonna have to figure that out. Yes and no. So a tag can only respond to one antenna at a time. So generally what you do, actually here's a great, we'll probably enjoy this. The company I worked for, we had actually wired up a anti-doping lab in the Middle East. And what we did was we put RFID readers, which were, they were a very low range reader, into carts. And in the ceilings, like every six feet, more readers and antennas. And then when the athletes would come in and they would give their urine sample, it was sealed in a glass container that had an RFID chip built into it. So now as it would move through the doping lab, they saw who had it because they had a tag. They saw what cart it was on. They saw which floor, which room. Because as you would pass each tag, it would just take a log of it. The only way that you would know though, which direction it was going, is because the previous reader had read it. So this becomes kind of the issue. And because you can't read it with two different ones, you have to play with location and worry a little bit about that. But yeah, I mean, it's the exact kind of project that it's becoming more and more common for. I think we're good. All right, well, once again, thank you everyone.