I first thought it was a camera but there was no point, After some searching I found that these things could communicate optical, so that might be it, if so how do they work?
It looks like an infrared receiver.
The general principle of these tags is explained in the Wikipedia article about electronic shelf labels.
You have shown us a Pricer label.
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Good bot
Very smart bot, almost seems like a human
And yet labelled as a bot.
Perhaps we need an infrared thingy to change their label?
“Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you”
Some of the stores near me have LEDs in the tags so if you’re looking for something and ask an employee they can look it up and turn on the light.
The price tag then flashes so you can find it easier.
A store near me (Canadian Tire) has them linked to their app - you find what you want in the app, go to the aisle listed and tap “find this item” and the LED flashes.
That’s a great feature, because their employees are fucking useless for knowing where things are.
Well most likely it won’t have any left on the shelf, especially if it were something listed in the weekly flyer.
The top white rectangle is a multi-color LED (presumably RGB). Can’t make out what’s in the bottom, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some form of light sensor for (literally) flashing new information onto the tag.
Yup. They use ceiling-mounted IR transmitters that are a bit like a big multi-directional TV remote control.
I’m pretty certain these ones use visible light, with ceiling-mounted LEDs. They flash at specific frequencies that are imperceptible to the human eye, but can be interpreted by the electronic shelf label. Here’s a whitepaper explaining the concept.
Source: for 20 or so years, I worked in technology for some of Australia’s largest retailers, and we tested a lot of these sorts of things in our labs. Very cool stuff.
They’re IR. Source: I have 5 Pricer labels sitting on the counter next to me.
Ah, fair enough. It’s been a long time since I clapped eyes on the test ones we had.
Hmm. They’re very common in NZ now, however it appears that document is talking about modulating the actual normal shop lighting, not just an independent transmitter.
I redid the electrical in a supermarket already fitted out with Pricer gear, and we went from dumb electronic-ballasted fluoros to dumb-driver LEDs, no DALI and certainly no comms uplink or modulation smart enough for that. I’m aware that the document suggests power-line communication to the drivers, but these were off the shelf dumb drivers/ballasts.
The ceiling mounted Pricer transceivers would have been doing all the transmitting, and as I never saw any visible light coming out of them, and the HF ripple and instability from the shop lighting would have been significant, I think it’s pretty safe to say they were using some form of IR.
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The light is visible, the flashing isn’t.
My off the cuff thought is that it may be used to change the content on the tags. Show it a specific QR code and it updates the content.
They cynical side of wants to believe that it’s being used to gather shopping analytics and correlate it to facial data.
These run on coin cells and have very little power. It is literally just an IR receiver.
Not everything is there to spy on you.
Probably an IR receiver module or photodiode.
