Low Battery Alarms and Enhanced Payload Verify
Low Battery Alarms and Enhanced Payload Verify
Earlier versions of RF Code tag firmware only sent a low-battery indication with tag status messages once every 24 hours. This was often not practical when assets were not consistently within range of the fixed reader infrastructure.
All tags that are currently shipping now use firmware that will send a low-battery indication with every tag status message when the tag battery is low.
If you have a tag-dense environment, such as a data center with large numbers of enterprise server and storage assets, it is possible to get a false payload, i.e., it's possible for a reader to misinterpret a tag status message as one that contains a low-batter indication. For a given tag, this would be seen in one beacon, but not in subsequent beacons. Two false positive payloads in a row from a given tag is extremely unlikely. Consistent sequential readings with low-battery indications are not false payloads but rather real indications of one or more tags with low battery life.
To address the possibility of false positive payload readings, RF Code software (Asset Manager and Zone Manager) has an “Enhanced Payload Verify” option available when configuring tag groups. This feature is enabled when using M250 readers (any firmware level) and when using M200 readers that run firmware version 2.44 or later (this feature is disabled on M200 readers running firmware earlier than V2.44). Therefore, it is recommended to upgrade all of your M200 readers to the latest firmware.
If this feature is set to YES, then two consecutive beacons must be seen before the reader and software interprets messages from tags as messages with low-battery indications. Additionally, setting the MULTI option stipulates that a payload with a low-battery indication must be seen by multiple readers (3, 4 or 5) before being reported up the chain (to Zone Manager and then to Asset Manager).
Almost all of the older tags that only sent low-battery indications every 24 hours have been circulated out of production, but if you do have any of these "legacy" tags, you should upgrade the firmware of your readers to the latest versions and/or consider replacing these "legacy" tags with newer inventory. For more information, please contact RF Code Support.