u/KOB_007

Hey r/RFID, looking for advice or vendor recommendations.

Our setup: Event management company. We rent out lights, speakers, stage gear, cables, etc. Equipment is organised into reusable boxes by pack type — Light Pack, Sound Pack, Stage Pack, Cable Pack, etc. Boxes go out for events, come back a few days later, all through one warehouse door.

What we need to track:

1. Every box — tagged once, linked to a pack type. The box's contents are defined in software via a pack manifest, so we know what should be inside without tagging every item.
2. Selected items inside the boxes — specifically things like cables, wires, and high-value gear get their own individual RFID tags. These items still live inside boxes during normal movement, but we want them tracked individually because they go missing most often.
3. Single pass through the portal — when a box rolls through the doorway, we want to read the box tag AND every tagged item inside it in one go, with each tag producing its own independent movement record linked to the event.

Requirements:

• Fixed UHF / RAIN RFID portal at the warehouse door, no handheld scanning
• IN/OUT direction detection
• Mixed box materials (plastic crates, hard flight cases, metal road cases, fabric bags)
• Software linked to events/jobs/customers, with exception handling for missed reads, already-OUT, etc.

Question for the community: We've come across redbeam and gototags which seems to cover this use case. Has anyone used them, or know of similar platforms (vendors or open-source) that handle this hybrid box + selective-item model well? Especially for the event rental industry.

Thanks!