Since summer I've had a great interest in active RFID, mostly because of stumbling upon DASH7 and subsequently reading as much as I could about the subject.
It's unfortunate that the DASH7 specs are gated by ISO. The old spec is available for $166.99 in Canada, but the interesting spec is Mode 2, and drafts of that are only available to members of the DASH7 Alliance, which requires deeper pockets than I have ($3500.00+). Apparently the Mode 2 spec will be available early 2011 from ISO...
Then comes software support. The old spec has a reference implementation in the form of OpenTag for Semtech chips, but a version of OpenTag that supports Mode 2 and/or touted MSP/Chipcon platforms has been just around the corner for months.
All of this sort of discourages my hobby activities directly related to DASH7, but I'm not one to be deterred that easily... I recently ordered a couple of eZ430-Chronos development kits. These are one of the coolest development kits I've seen (especially for the price, which has seen deep discounts), and are supposedly a supported platform for DASH7/OpenTag. I'm working on getting the MSP-GCC tools installed on my Mac, at which point I hope to do something interesting with them. I'm putting some faith in the fact that the new version of OpenTag will be available soon with MSP/CC support, but even if not I should be able to enable basic communications and locating.
