Video: How to Create an RFID Label in CODESOFT

Creating RFID labels with CODESOFT Enterprise RFID software is easy. Today we are going to take a look at how it’s done.

The first step in creating RFID labels is to make sure that the hardware and the driver we are using support RFID technology. You will notice here the RFID button is grayed out, so if I go to select my printer we can intuitively say that the pdf printer is not an RFID device but the ZT610 when I select it and hit ok, we will notice that the button comes to life and we can select it. This type of printer supports EPC-type tags as part of the functionality and the technology of the printer, and as soon as we select that we could get to all the other properties of the tag like the size, the class, the certain data that we're putting in here. This is also where we would lock the tag as well, all these different properties. For now, we will leave everything for defaults and I'll hit ok. That will bring up the data that I can encode into this tag and you'll notice that there is a visual down here of the tag itself, this is not representative of where the tag is on your label. No matter where the tag is, if it's a couple of inches in the middle, the printer will know to encode it. This is just a visual reference for you; this is where this label will be encoded with RFID.

As far as the data goes, we have a few different formats we can select. We can select ASCII data, hexadecimal data, or structured data stream here, and that is what we are going to use today for this example. I can select the identifier to be the SGTIN-96, and as I do that you'll notice immediately all the different properties of that particular identifier are presented to me for encoding. I can modify these as I need to, so I'll leave the header and the filter at their default values, but the partition I'll set to be partition 6. Then we can use these other properties of this identifier to encode the tag. So, we can type in the company prefix if we like, I can type in all these values. What I think is a little more valuable is linking these to a variable that already exists on the label. So, if this data needs to change ever we don't have to go into the tag properties and type this in again, but instead, we can quickly allow for a user to type these in or pull from a database for example. For the company prefix, I'll use the data source RFID prefix, and then for the item reference, I'll use the RFID reference. And the serial number I have is a counter field, and that is named RFID serial.

Now we can see that I am ready to encode these data points while printing. It's as simple as that, we hit ok and we can go through our regular print process with our users as if we weren't using RFID labels. We can have the user enter all this data and upon print, the label will be printed and the tag will be encoded in the same stroke.