Seeking help: RFID Reader Visual Basic

RFID93

Hello, all! I'm new to these forums and to RFID technology and visual basic programming. I'm currently working on a project where I want to use the RFID reader to track items of clothing. The reader would be attached to the opening of a bin and the user would swipe their clothing tag past the reader every time they placed it in the bin or removed it from the bin. I've already purchased the USB reader and tag set from Parallax and have the source code provided by Chris Savage on the forums. I'm looking to start with this code and modify it to satisfy my purposes. This is where I'm not sure exactly how to proceed.
I have experience with taking some programming courses, but this project is my first introduction to visual basic. Here are descriptions of what the current program is able to do and what my goals are in modifying the program:

1. Currently the read out displays a tag ID as such: 4900EAEE40. I would like the output to display a string such as "blue socks" whenever a tag is swiped. Is there a way I can set each unique tag equal to a description of what clothing item it represents?
2. A big component of my project is that the user can look to see when their clothing item is in the bin. The current source code compiles a list of the tag IDs and will repeatedly output an ID each time the tag is swiped. Instead I would like to make it so that the program recognizes when a tag is being swiped into the drawer and when it is being swiped out. I don't know if I could base this on whether the tag has been swiped an odd or even amount of times?
3. The ultimate goal was to have this program work simultaneously with multiple bins so that it would recognize which bin your clothes are currently stored in. To do this, I would need the program to be accessing multiple com ports at once and storing the inputted data (tag IDs) in the corresponding bins, so that the user could later ask for the location of their red shirt and be told which bin they last placed it in. This goal has since fallen lower on the priority list as it seems to be beyond my skill level and available time.

I'm hoping to recieve some advice on the easiest ways to modify Chris Savage's source code to meet my needs or even alternative resources I should be looking into to help me towards my goals. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and any assisstance you may provide.

Mike Green

What you will have to do is to have some kind of database containing the descriptions of the items corresponding to the tags. The "key" for the database will have to be the tag code. You'll need programs to create and maintain this database as well as a program that will read the tag code, look it up in the database, and display the description. This amount of programming is way beyond what advice we can offer on this forum. It's a typical task though for Visual Basic and there should be examples of this sort of thing in the various tutorials and books on Visual Basic use. I used to have some books on Palm Pilot programming and this sort of project was one of the worked examples covered.

dmagnus

If this is just a "one off" project that will be used by you it could probably be done with an XML "database" that would be fairly easy to maintain (XML is merely a text file). VB has many tools for building and reading this form of data. If you are using VB.NET, there is even more ability to do some really neat stuff with fairly simple files without having to have a database system set up. But, as Mike says, it is beyond the scope of a forum such as this. Here is something that might get you started: http://www.ehow.com/list_7637971_visual-2008-xml-data-projects.html

RFID93

Thank you both for your input! I found a way to get a working prototype using only visual basic, but I can see how the code is quickly growing out of hand. I'll take your advice and look into using databases to help me simplify things. Thank you both again!