Cognitive Solutions Advantage RFID Thermal Printer - Manual (Page 33)

Copyright © 2004, Cognitive. 28
Chapter
5
Printing RFID Tags
Printing RFID tags may include printing information on the tag,
writing data to the tag, reading data from the tag, or a combination
these actions. While tags may differ in appearance and storage capacity,
programming the tag properly depends on understanding how the
Advantage RFID Thermal Printer writes to and reads from the RFID
tag.
NOTE: Cognitive highly recommends the use of Cognitive-certified RFID tags
with the Advantage RFID Thermal Printer. Refer to
Appendix B, Certified Tags .
RFID Tag Overview
Each RFID tag contains a small microchip used to store data. RFID
programming commands are used to transfer data from a label format
or other data source into the tag. Several important concepts must be
understood when writing data to an RFID tag.
Data is stored in blocks.
Each block stores a specific number of characters. Use the RF_BLKSZ
variable or the specification sheet for the RFID tag to determine this
number.
Refer to Figure 5-1, Data Blocks. With a block size of 4, the RFID tag
will store 4 characters in each block. Therefore, a data string that
contains 18 characters occupies 5 blocks. The WT command places a
NULL character at the end of each stored data string. In this example,
data is stored in blocks 0 through 4.