Found an interesting use of RFID recently.
For Father’s day, I bought my dad a Shot Scope V3 golf watch. It works as a golf GPS, while tracking a ton of data about his golf game.
It has 16 RFID tags that come with it, to automatically track which club is being used. They screw into the top of the club, into the handle (most grips have a hole in the center).
They are indeed 13.56MHz, I did a scan with TagInfo, and they’re ICODE SLIX chips.
Here’s the full scan if anyone is curious:
16-97-AB-EC-50-01-04-E0_2022-06-19 16-41-27_taginfo_scan.txt (1.9 KB)
The most interesting part to me is the watch itself. I was wondering how it managed to read 13.56MHz chips from such a long distance, and one with such variance. It’s meant to be able to read the tag whenever you’re holding the club, ready to swing.
The actual antenna is inside the band.
On a video about replacing the band, you can see the connector:
The ideal reading zone is on the long band, the one without the buckle, near that black plastic (it actually clips into the holes on the buckle band, to keep it from flopping around).
I tried it out, the distance is great, reading from an inch or so with tons of variation in position. It has a mode for testing the tags, and whenever I held the club normally, it was able to pick it up. Amazing what’s possible with well-tuned and designed antennas.