Samvith Technologies

Ultra™– Step into the future of timing

Samvith is pleased to announce the release of Ultra, the latest offering from RFID Race Timing Systems. Ultra uses the latest in EPCglobal Class 1, Generation 2 UHF tags, RFID readers and antennas to create a superior timing solution.  The three unique components of Ultra are;

The Box – Contains the RFID reader, networking hardware and industrial computer. The control box is a small heavy duty case that is designed for work in tough conditions. With 8 antenna ports, one control box can drive 8 antennas to cover a 9m wide timing point. The UHF reader inside is currently the world’s most sensitive Gen2 reader with a maximum receive sensitivity of -80dBm. With some antennas we have achieved a read range of up to 80m using these readers.

The Antenna – RFID Race Timing has developed their own UHF patch antennas specifically for sports timing. These antennas have maximum sensitivity to our chosen tags whilst minimising unwanted reads flanking the read zone. The antennas are currently embedded in a flexible EVA mat that is easy to position in many configurations. Each mat piece measures 1.1m wide by 0.45m deep and weigh’s 2.5kg. The antenna mats are extremely thin at just 11mm (0.4 inches) high thereby avoiding issues with athletes tripping on a thick and bulky antenna section.

The BAP – Stands for Battery Assisted Passive and is an absolute revolution in transponder design. Until now UHF tags have had problems being read on the human body. Several of our competitors have tried to address this by placing the transponder off the human body using fiddly shoe lace tags – a system that requires input from the competitor and is not ‘idiot proof’. All passive tags are severely compromised when placed very close to the human body due to detuning and loss of backscatter signal. Enter the BAP tag by PowerID™. These tags use an ultra thin, flexible, and environment friendly battery that powers the onboard RFID chip thereby boosting energy backscatter to the reader. The performance gains are remarkable for what is essentially a passive tag that can be produced at low cost (unlike an active tag that uses a coin battery cell). The battery is non-toxic and has been cleared for safe disposal by the most stringent of environmental rules imposed in Europe.

The beauty of the BAP is that it can be worn on the back of the chest race number completely eliminating the need for the competitor to perform fiddly manoeuvres with an adhesive label on their shoe. This really is the ultimate system for timing large running events throughout the world.

Applications – ULTRA has been designed primarily to time major running events but is also extremely efficient at timing mountain biking and road cycling. For cycling the BAPs are easily read from the race number plate (MTB) or from a special disposable label wrapped around the seat post.

The advantages over our competitors –

• The BAPs cost about the same as shoe tags without the hassle of runners having to place a transponder on the shoe. The athlete does not have to do anything special that they otherwise would be doing in a manually timed race.
• The smallest and most compact of all timing systems with the control box 35cm x 25cm x 20cm able to time 9 metres width.
• Proven and stable firmware ported across from our successful HDD Systems.
• Antennas are embedded in mats that are easy to transport. We also design antennas for overhead gantries but believe the mats are the simple and safest option.
• Race Bib and tag are easily posted out to competitors pre-race.
• All the benefits of tag encoding and printing on the latest Datamax and Zebra RFID thermal printers.
• Reasonable pricing on control box and antenna mats.

What is UHF?
UHF stands for Ultra High Frequency. Ultra uses UHF RFID to communicate between reader and tag around the 900MHz spectrum. The FCC standard for USA is 902-928 MHz whilst Europe is more stringent with just less channels near 868Mhz. Countries like Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia use a similar spectrum between 920-926 Mhz. Readers are preconfigured to these spectrums and country specific protocols (ie. frequency hopping or fixed frequency).

What is EPC Class 1 Gen 2 Protocol?
Ultra utilises the Gen2 Protocol adopted worldwide for passive UHF readers and tags. There are many vendors manufacturing hardware that can read the same tags in most countries. As the name suggests, this is the second protocol that has been released which gives far better tag reading performance over legacy protocols. The reading of 100 tags per second in difficult environments with the one reader is now quite achievable using Gen2.

What advantages does UHF have over low and dual frequency?
The number of vendors that manufacture UHF tags is large. That means UHF tags are some of the least expensive of RFID transponders on the market owing to manufacture volumes, competition between vendors and minimal use of copper and silicon. This makes the UHF tag priced low enough to make it disposable.

What is the lifespan on the BAP?
The battery on the BAP lasts for 2.5 years when kept at temperatures below 20 degrees Celsius. The tag can still be read with a dead battery and will act like any other passive UHF tag after this time.

Do the BAPs work in the rain?
Yes. We have tested the read rates of BAPs under wet and raining conditions and there is no compromise in performance under these conditions. The BAPs themselves are waterproof when applied to a normal wax style race bib commonly used in running races.

Learner Portal

• Searchable Course Catalog
• Facility to Buy and Take courses online
• Learning Gap Analysis with System-generated Course Plan to fill skill gaps
• Informative Report Card on learner performance
• Interaction with experts using the ‘Ask Mentor’ feature
• Integrated Message Board and Discussion Forums
• Easy management of Tasks and Reminders using the ‘My Tasks’ feature
• Advanced tools to Upload, Share, and Manage file

Content and Knowledge Management

• Create learning plans for groups or individuals
• Manage various types of content:
  • SCORM-compliant courses
  • PDF, PowerPoint, Word, and HTML documents
  • Audio and Video files
  • Assessment Engines for creating adaptive tests
  • Assignments and Reference Links
• Track learner performance and assessment scores
• Assign skills and competencies to various course items for automated skill gap analysis
• Publish courses to catalog
• Group courses in libraries and assign cost for library or individual courses
• Offer multilingual courses
• Import and export content to XLS files

Assessment

• Create questions of different types such as MCQs, MMCQs, FIBs, and True and False among others
• Give assessments in training or evaluation mode
• Tag questions with custom parameters
• Configure assessments to pick up questions from question bank based on specific parameter values
• Give assessments in timed or non-timed mode

Collaboration

• Virtual Classroom
• Discussion Forums
• Surveys and Quizzes
• Announcements
• FAQ Lists

Skill Gap and Performance Analysis

• Create comprehensive matrix consisting of job roles, skill sets, and competency requirements
• Assign skill sets and competency levels to learning units
• Use self-analysis tools to analyze skill gaps and receive system-suggested course plan to bridge gaps
• Enable managers to view and verify self-analysis done by teams
• Analyze pre- and post-assessment scores to conduct performance analysis

Administration

• Create roles, groups, and accounts for users
• Create multiple client interfaces
• Manage course catalog for multiple clients
• Manage user registration requests
• Manage enrollment policy
• Manage online shopping cart

• DMS manages all kinds of documents – paper, electronic and images (tiff, gif, jpeg, etc)
• Faster retrieval saves time
• Organizes documents
• Safe against natural disaster
• Multiple users can share documents at the same time
• No need to buy and install software (like MS Office or others) at multiple locations.
• Maintains confidentiality, secrecy and accuracy of data
• Ability to step into the customer’s shoes and provide state-of-the-art solutions on a turnkey basis
• Pioneering innovative technologies
• Error-free data capturing
• An efficient and economical option
• Expertise developed in heterogeneous environments over decades
• Highly scalable

• Documents Conversion:

Conversion is done by Digital Imaging technology. If any document needs to be converted to electronic format by converting to the image and stored with proper indexing. The system generates the document names automatically.

• Image Enhancement:

Sometimes while converting the document to electronic format, the setup adds certain kind of noise to the image. So to improve that noise and make the image clean we have introduced various methods to enhance the image quality, these include skew removal, speckle-removal, Black border removal, etc.

• Document Storage and Archival:

All documents are stored centrally. Each document is indexed and stored on a secondary storage device with proper encryption. Facility for archival of document images is also provided in the form of an application enabling the storage on storage media.

• Document Retrieval:

While searching, document is identified and located because of proper indexing mechanism. Each document can be searched as per specific attributes (e.g. Title, Author, Date of creation, etc.)

• Security Features:

Security is achieved by keeping the access level permissions depending upon the privileges granted to the user. All the documents are first encrypted and then stored on the storage media to prevent piracy and / or unauthorized access. The documents stored can only be viewed through our application.

• Authentication and Admin module
• Open source with license versions
• Robust versioning system
• Dynamic workflow automation
• User and hierarchy definitions
• Masters
  • Complete Metadata as per guidelines of MHRD, GOI.

• Indexing
• Imaging database
  • Master Image
  • Clean Master
  • Access Image
  • Thumbnails

• Search option including key words, manuscript, author, year, language, category, page number, etc.,
• Print and save options.
• Transliteration support
• Online translations (language support)
• Download, Save options in various formats like Jpeg, TIFF, PDF etc.,
• Customized reports

Digitization

• Digital technology opens up a totally new perspective.The World Wide Web holds millions of websites and the internet is market place for research, teaching, expression, publication and communication of information.
• Libraries and Archives are society’s primary information providers with respect to cataloguing and processing management. Besides preserving and providing access to ‘born digital material’ a great number of libraries and organizations having old physical documents in storage are nowadays have also turned to creating digital surrogates from their existing resources.
• Digitization means acquiring, converting, storing and providing information in a computer format that is standardized, organized and available from demand from common system. With specialized scanner’s old physical documents are converted into compressed digital formats and stored systematically for future reference.

Why Digitize

The reasons for implementing a digitization project or more precisely for digital conversion of non-digital source material are varied. The decision to digitize may be in order to:

• To increase access : This is the most obvious and primary reason, where there is thought to be a high demand from users and the library or source has the desire to improve access to a specific location.

• To improve services to an expanding user’s group by providing enhanced access to the institution’s resources with respect to education, long life learning.
• To reduce the handling and use of fragile or heavily used original material and create a “back up” copy for endangered material.
• Moreover, electronic documents are more versatile than printed documents: they can be displayed on a computer screen, edited and printed out.

Principal reasons for digitization

For enhanced access

Mainly for research purposes.

To facilitate new forms of access and use

The main purpose in this case is to enable the use of original documents that cannot be consulted in its original form other than by visiting its specific repository and for manuscripts that has been damaged and where technology is needed to reveal its content or shape.

For preservation

The purpose is, in the first place, to create accurate reproductions of the original documents on a long lasting medium. These reproductions need to satisfy both users of today and future potential users, and must therefore both be of high quality and possess a physical stability that can be maintained over time.

Advantages

• Electronic documents can be shared easily:
• They can be duplicated easily and cheaply, sent by email or put on a website. They can be added to a digital library and made available to users on CD-ROM, or through an Intranet or the Internet.
• Electronic documents are easy to store and retrieve.
• Thousands of documents can be stored on a single CD-ROM or hard drive.
• The user can find a document easily and quickly using the computer’s search capabilities.
• Transforming documents into digital formats also avoids physical deterioration and mishandling of cultural heritage materials such as handwritten manuscripts or books.
• Retaining physical reliability is one of the issues related to the digital preservation of electronic files, which also include maintaining availability and security of the file collection over time.

digitization with ATIZ DIY Scanner

The Texas Instruments half duplex 134kHz transponder is a litte miracle. The ‘batteryless’ internal circuit derives power from the electromagnetic field generated from a special antenna in the mat. After powering the transponder up, the mat antennas listen for the transponders unique tag code transmission. This is achieved in 50 milliseconds in all environmental conditions. Transponders can even be read under water!

Transponder timing bands can be bought outright from any TI distributer and their are no further lease fees associated with their use. The one transponder times all types of events so you don’t have to fork out for a different type of transponder if you want to time a triathlon. You can choose where are when you use them in your events. If you need a larger number of transponders for a particular event we can hire these out to most countries.

The transponders are embedded in a tough plastic housing so that they cannot be damaged. The housings are either threaded onto a soft neoprene ankle band or can be tied onto the shoelace. The whole neoprene ankle band weighs less than 15g and is barely noticeable by the athlete whether they are swimming, running or cycling. Many years of research and development have led to a neoprene band that causes absolutely no chafing.