
Ask HN: Have you ever integrated RFID / BLE tags in your software? - leesalminen
Hi HN-<p>I&#x27;m the founder of Gingr (gingrapp.com). We&#x27;re a SaaS product that is geared towards pet care facilities which helps small business owners operate more efficiently. Think a POS+ERP+CRM for a specific niche industry.<p>We recently thought up a new feature that we want to implement. However, it requires a hardware piece. Basically, we want to add a feature where:<p>- The business issues a tag to their customer<p>- When the customer arrives at the business the tag is read<p>- When a tag is read, it notifies our software with the tag ID<p>- Our software will locate that customer in our system and bring up their record for easy access at the reception desk<p>Range is key here. Would definitely need to be contactless. Ideally the tag could be read when the customer enters the parking lot, before they even step foot in the building.<p>The problem is that nobody on our team has experience working with RFID&#x2F;BLE&#x2F;NFC&#x2F;etc.. technology. I&#x27;m wondering if anyone here on HN does have experience in this realm. What technology did you pick and why?<p>I did find a company called Kontakt (kontakt.io) that sells BLE readers&#x2F;beacons. My concern is that they may be a small company that could disappear tomorrow. Does anyone here have experience with them?<p>Also open to paying someone to consult with us on this project- specifically around identifying hardware to use.<p>Didn&#x27;t know where else to reach out, so I&#x27;m posting here! If this is against the rules, I&#x27;m sorry and please feel free to delete it.
======
justhamade
If you are doing it from the parking lot you don't need RFID/BLE/NFC you can
use GPS. If you want to do indoor proximity via your app you can use a beacon
with the sdks for iOS
([https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/deter...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/determining_the_proximity_to_an_ibeacon))
and android
([https://developers.google.com/beacons/](https://developers.google.com/beacons/)).
Estimote is probably one of the most popular beacon hardware makers
[https://estimote.com/](https://estimote.com/) There are many.

If you really need to do this without a customer app, that has location
services turned, on then you will need to use some service provider like
kontakt.io. If you search for indoor location tracking there are lots of them.

Also note there are some privacy issues here. I wouldn't want to carry around
a BLE card just so the staff at a petstore know that I am in their parking
lot.

Also there is the cost of giving these to users, ultimately the customer will
have to cover that cost, which I wouldn't want to do.

