Application of smart handheld device in agricultural product traceability system

Abstract

The quality and safety of agricultural products is becoming more and more important nowadays. The devices commonly used are POS (Point of Sales) terminals, electronic scales, bar-code scanners, etc. The mismatches among various devices cause a lot of problems during data communication, synchronization, manipulation and flow control. Here a smart handheld device will be introduced, which can resolve these problems. Highly integrated design reduces the total cost of the traceability devices; an overall control makes the cooperation easy and guarantees the traceability flow more reliable and robust. The device hardware mainly consists of an ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) core, a power management block and some functional peripherals. The implementation of the device focused on four issues: 1. power circuit and power management design in multi-power system; 2. peripheral cooperation under CPU control; 3. signal integrity and power integrity in PCB design; 4. transaction model based software design and database synchronization. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.