Base station hardware
The reader device for receiving the tag signals and implementing the meshing will be the OpenBeacon USB stick. This is a very small variation of the 2.4GHz OpenBeacon reader which contains a freely programmable 32 bit ARM controller. It can be reprogrammed without special tools over USB and we released the firmware under the GNU General Public License.
Beacon tag hardware and functions
The Sputnik tags also improved: we manufactured them with gold plated pads to improve their lifetime, added a hardware push button (instead of the former touch sensor field), an optional buzzer interface and adapted the circuit board to fit into a small, round, plastic case, that can be purchased additionally.
We want to enable the use of the push button as a kind of camp mood measurement: each time you feel good or you enjoy the actual lecture, music, food, view or company you can press the button on your Sputnik tag one to four times in a row, indicating the level of enjoyment (1 -> fair ... 4 -> time of my life). When processing the data online during the camp time or later, a map of joy bubbles on the camp ground can be displayed.
Active 2.4Ghz RFID tracking system
The CCC Sputnik RFID device will be used as a visitor tracking system at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress. The 23nd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) is a four-day conference on technology, society and utopia. As usual, 23C3 will take place at Berliner Congress Center in the time from December 27th to December 30th 2006.
This use case is intended to demonstrate the actual threats of tracking and data mining with the RFID technology.
There will be 1000 devices available for the expected 3000 guests at the conference. Each device will transmit its unique id which can be connected to further information the user is willing to publish. The transmitted signals will be collected by up to 25 RFID base stations within the congress building and transfered to a data server via Ethernet.
A server based software is evaluating and estimating the positions of each visitor with an active device based on its signal strength, occurrence and position of the receiving base station. There will be different transmission power levels to increase the accuracy of the position calculation.
