Wiring and first setup

What you need

The RFID reader and the cable it ships with (M12 connector)
A DC 7.5–36 V supply — the AGV’s own supply is fine
A USB-to-RS485 adapter if connecting to a computer
ISO15693 or ISO14443A tags

Wiring

The RS485 cable has four cores, identified by colour.

Colour	Function	Connect to
Brown	VCC	Supply +
Black	GND	Supply − and the adapter’s GND
White	A (D+)	Adapter A
Blue	B (D−)	Adapter B

Warning

🔴 The black wire goes to two places — the supply negative and the RS485 adapter’s ground.

Connect only A and B and it usually works on the bench, because everything shares one outlet. Move it onto a robot running on its own battery, the two reference voltages drift apart, and you start getting occasional corrupt reads.

Remember the pattern: fine on the bench, corrupt on the robot — suspect ground first.

How you know A and B are swapped

Adapter labels are not consistent between brands: some print A/B, others D+/D−.

The symptom when swapped — power is on, every wire is connected, and nothing ever answers. Not a wrong reply: silence.

Just swap them and try. It takes ten seconds and cannot damage anything.

First connection

Factory defaults — address 1 · 115200 baud · 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit

Wire it up and apply power; the light on the reader should come on
Open the test tool and pick the page for your model
Press Connect and select the adapter’s port
Press red on — if the reader’s red light comes on, you are talking to it

Tip

Press a light button first, with no tag involved.

If the light responds, then wiring, power, address and baud rate are all already correct, and anything left is about the tag — you have split the problem in two instead of guessing.

If the light does not come on:

Symptom	Check
Nothing answers at all	A/B swapped? · GND connected? · Right model page?
Answers but unreadable / CRC fails	Baud rate mismatch — try the others
You do not know the address	Press Scan for reader and let it sweep

Mounting on the robot

Read range is 0–160 mm (0–100 mm on the YP models), measured from the reader face to the tag.

Important

Do not mount it as low as the specification allows. Leave more clearance than the arithmetic suggests, because:

factory floors are not level everywhere
wheels wear down, lowering the robot over time
a heavy load compresses the suspension

Mounting at roughly half the maximum range is safer — at 160 mm, mount around 70–80 mm.

Warning

🔴 Metal near the reader shortens the range, especially steel under or around the tag.

If tags are set into reinforced concrete, the real range will be shorter than the datasheet says. Test at the actual site — do not trust the specification alone.

Changing address and baud rate

The test tool can do both — but understand the consequences first.

Danger

🔴 Whatever you change here, change it in the AGV software too.

Otherwise the real system cannot reach the reader while its light still looks perfectly normal, which sends people looking in the wrong place entirely.

Write down every value you change.

When you must change the address — when more than one reader shares an RS485 bus. Duplicate addresses answer at the same time and the replies collide.