Mission

The mission of the Rifidi project is to build a complete open source RFID hardware emulator.  

A hardware emulator is defined as software that mimics a hardware platform.   They are usually used for development of applications and are especially popular in the embedded development industry.   Many embedded devices publish emulators that developers code to and then move their code to a real device and test them.  

We started the Rifidi project so that we can prototype, test and build better RFID systems.   RFID requires a fundamentally different approach to development and testing than what is currently available.   Not only does an RFID project contain the normal aspects of a J2EE application such as code and business rules, it also has a specific dependency on the hardware, the environment and how that can change the data.   It is this unpredictable and intangible aspect of RFID that makes it both exciting yet hard to implement.

Our goal is to take the intangibles out of RFID development and to make Rifidi the First and Best tool for testing and developing RFID systems.

History

Rifidi was originally conceived in February 2005 when a few of the core developers were trying to implement an RFID system for a large client.   We were immediately struck by the complexity of the task and we were only working with 10 readers!   Even though we had a very competent team with lots of RFID and J2EE expertise we struggled with the development and testing of the application.  

During and after this implementation we were faced with the following questions:

• How can we do a load test of this application? (For some reason telling the client to run his factory at double capacity for a day did not receive a warm reception)
• How can we modify something quickly and see how the application we just built reacts?
• How can we get busy developers to stand in a factory and perform unit tests by telling them to 'send one box now', then another and then to hold 'this box in the field' etc.
• Even though we are perfect coders how can we make sure we covered every test case?
• How can we test our client's environment after we have finished the project and they have a problem?

After this project we talked to several software companies and RFID experts who all agreed that a simulation tool would be valuable for testing.   The main problem was that no one was willing to build one, especially one that is not proprietary to their server.

This problem became critical to us when we were faced with another client who asked these same questions.   Since there was no solution in sight we decided to do something about this problem.

Rifidi officially began development in March 2006 with a small but very committed team of full time and part time developers and RFID analysts.

Where are we now?

Rifidi is currently under active development and working towards our first major milestone - the ever elusive Version 1.0 release.   This release will feature a full modeling environment (hopefully eclipse driven) and an extensive database of relevant reader emulations.

As of June 24th, 2006 Rifidi is a fully open project with access to our first functional release.   This means that the whole open source community has full read access to everything the core development team does.   Our development releases, sources, bugs, conversations and presentations are fully available for anyone interested.