About iButton Technology - www.ibutton.com
Click here to view part of the iButton promotional film
The iButton® is a computer chip enclosed in a 16mm stainless steel can. There are
65+ million iButtons in use around the world. Because of this unique and durable
stainless steel can, up-to-date information can travel with a person or object
anywhere they go. The steel button can be mounted virtually anywhere because it is
rugged enough to withstand harsh environments, indoors or outdoors. It is durable
enough to attach to a key fob, ring, watch, or other personal items and used daily
for applications such as access control to buildings and computers.
The iButton can transfer information to and from a computer via the 1-Wire
interface, and each iButton has it’s own unique identifier (for example:
2700000095C33108). When you touch an iButton to a blue dot receptor, information
is transferred between the iButton and the host PC.
The iButton is made out of stainless steel and is wear-tested for
10-year durability. It is shock resistant, scratch resistant, and waterproof.
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Components of an iButton System:
- iButtons
- A host system: this can be a PC, a laptop, or a hand-held computer.
- A reader/writer device to get information into and out of the button.
This can be the Blue Dot mentioned above, a pen-style probe, or a hand-held.
- A layer of software to interface iButtons to computers and produce the
desired information in the desired format. For all iButtons, iButton-TMEX is
a software platform on which to build applications. TMEX removes the tedious
low-level programming of drivers and utilities. The TMEX Software and SDK are
downloadable at no charge.
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Cost of an iButton System:
- iButtons range in cost from $2.23 to $53 in quantities of one; larger
quantities are discounted.
- The Blue Dot receptor and 1-Wire Adpater, a simple reader/writer device,
costs $15.
- The TMEX Software and SDKs are free.
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Personalized Greeter Experience
Whenever entering or exiting the PTC, a personalized greeting is triggered by touching an iButton
to a reader located near the door. A pre-chosen song will play as relevant messages and other personal visual elements
are shown on a screen. The key to this system is a
shared database, accessible to the user through an easy to understand web interface and accessible to
each iButton station via the campus-wide network.
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Location Tracking
Though our system is certainly not designed to become “Big Brother”, we feel it is a useful
feature to know where your team members are. After debating the pros and cons to location
tracking, we have decided to make “last known location” available to other ETCers, but not
to track one’s time in each location. We feel this is a good compromise between useful
functionality and a system that becomes more cumbersome than it is worth.
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