RFID Badges
IEEE RFID 2026 will feature conference RFID badges which attendees can choose to accept and/or carry. These include both an active RFID (Bluetooth Low Energy) and passive RFID (RAIN RFID) badge.
Active RFID Badge
This badge is a Minew MTB11 Ambient Light Harvesting BLE Tag which spontaneously transmits the following information in Bluetooth Low Energy advertisement packets whenever it is sufficiently charged from ambient light:
- a unique 48-bit identifier
- battery voltage
- temperature
These badges, custom-printed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the IEEE RFID conference, are proudly co-sponsored by reelyActive and Minew.
Passive RFID Badge
This badge is a RAIN RFID (UHF) tag which can be read using a reader, or scanned via QR code, to obtain the following information:
- a unique 96-bit identifier
The value is intentionally a custom conference/demo identifier, rather than a GS1-compliant retail EPC, and has the following form, where the Xs represent the sequential identifier: 1EEE12F1D2026XXXXXXXXXXX.
These badges, custom-printed for the IEEE RFID 2026 conference, are proudly sponsored by Uniform Direct UK.
Motivation
“Uniform Direct UK has provided passive UHF RFID labels for IEEE RFID 2026 attendees. Each label has its own unique conference identifier, which can be read by RFID and also scanned as a QR code. The numbers are simple, sequential and do not contain personal attendee information. The idea is to give attendees something practical to scan, test, compare and discuss during the conference – a small real-world RFID example you can actually hold, read and experiment with. Look closely and you may even spot a little RFID humour hidden in the identifier.”
“The advent of commercially-viable batteryless Bluetooth Low Energy beacons, such as the Minew MTB11, combine key advantages of both active and passive RFID. Technology partners reelyActive and Minew have provided the novel MTB11 tags for attendees to experiment with during the conference, including live demos in the tutorials, and beyond, as the tags can be read for years, provided they are exposed to ambient (indoor) light, using mobile apps or just about anything with a Bluetooth Low Energy radio!”
How to read the badges
Mobile
The Minew MTB11’s advertisement data packets can be observed and interpreted on a mobile device running the MinewLink App for Android or the MinewLink App for iOS. The passive tag can be optically scanned (QR code) or read by recently-released RAIN-capable mobile devices, such as the Zebra TC501 powered by the Qualcomm® Dragonwing™ Q-6690 Processor.
Fixed Gateways / Readers
Bluetooth Low Energy gateways and RAIN RFID readers can read the active and passive badges, respectively. Pareto Anywhere open source IoT middleware by reelyActive—which is free to use—can be used to interpret the data, which it can collect from common gateways and readers.
An easy way to get started is to follow step-by-step instructions to run Pareto Anywhere on Windows/Mac/Linux PC or server, and then to follow the tutorials to interface with an on-board BLE radio and/or external gateways/readers.
Real-time MTB11 data in Pareto Anywhere
Historical MTB11 data in Grafana (via Pareto Anywhere + PostgreSQL)
See the following tutorials to collect, visualise, analyse and alert on data using an open source technology stack:
