Wireless Scan
Wireless Scan in the mobile app is a powerful tool to help you scan for wirelessly tracked items within range of your mobile device or to add new wireless tags and tools into the platform. New scan allows you to perform a scan in the app and update the ‘Last Scan’ date and time and ‘Last Scan Location’ in the platform. The Add New Tags function enables you to scan for tags that are within range of your mobile device, filter down to the manufacturer you are trying to add from, add the tag to the platform, and link it to an item.
New Scan
New scan is used to update scan information of tags that are within range of your mobile device. New Scan is found under Wireless Scan in the app navigation.
Start a Scan
Select Start a Scan and choose the location of your scan at the top of the screen.
Once you have selected the scan location select Start Scan. This will initiate a wireless tag scan and the screen will start to populate with items that you are tracking in the platform that you have linked to a wireless tag.
Scanned items that are assigned to the location you have selected as your scan location will display with a green SCANNED stamp.
Scanned items that are assigned to a different location than you have selected as your scan location will display with a red SCANNED stamp.
Stop Scan and Not Found
To update the scan data you can either select stop scan or navigate away. To view items that have wireless tags and are assigned to the location that you are scanning but did not scan you can use the Not Found tab.
First stop the scan you are performing and then select the not found tab to view missing items. To get more information, such as assignment, on the missing items you can select the 'i' icon.
Add New Tags
To start tracking new tags from the mobile app you can select the option to Add New Tags and use signal strength to identify the tag you are trying to add, create the tag in the platform, and link it to a new or existing item.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Signal strength isn’t a precision indicator for proximity. You must use methods that include signal blocking materials (faraday material) and movement to determine which signal id belongs to which tag. A signal that is coming from a tag further away could show stronger based on a variety of variables such as battery level.
Use the signal strength filter to limit results that are returned. It is recommended to start low (left) and gradually increase to make sure you are getting results, but reducing the number of results shown.
Strongly recommended
If you are adding from a specific manufacturer that you can identify, select the manufacturer to filter out other results.
Select Find New Tags to start getting results. All tag models broadcast at different frequency and times so you may have to wait 5-10 seconds before you are seeing all results. For tags that are embedded into tools, make sure that a battery is in the tool and has power.
Using a signal blocking material such as faraday faraday fabric you can drape the material over the tool/tag and your mobile device to greatly reduce the signal strengths of other tags. It is helpful to perform a few scans to start and get a baseline understanding of what the signal strengths are for the tags around you. It is recommended to keep your mobile device and tags you are NOT trying to add stationary while scanning. Moving the tag that you are trying to identify is helpful as you should see the signal strength changing for that tag. Use the ID # to keep track of the tags you are scanning.
In the images below you can see in the first scan two tags are potential candidates for the tag that is trying to be added.
Note that 0100001024 and 0100001606 are both scanning with a high signal strength. In the second scan, faraday fabric was placed over the mobile device and the tag. This helped narrow down all results and made it clear that 0100001024 was the ID for the physical tag trying to be identified.
From here you can select ADD and link the tag to an item that has already been created in the platform or you can create a new item if it has not been set up in the system yet. You can also enter a serial number if there is a unique identifier you would like to use to further identify the tag.
Once you have finished creating the tag it will be created in the platform and you can edit it through the cloud interface if needed.
View Scan History
View Scan History allows you to review the scans that you have performed and the items that were found in the scans. The landing screen shows a list of the scans with location and date/time in reverse chronological order. You can select a specific scan to see further details of what was found in the scan.
