Bluetooth and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) are two technologies which are used in lots of contexts today, for example Bluetooth is used for communication between devices and RFID as identification of items at storehouses. This work contains a comparison between those two technologies in a time tracking environment for sports events. To compare the two technologies, a Bluetooth time tracking prototype based on Raspberry Pi 3 and Android Sony Xperia M5 were developed to be compared with a preexisting RFID timing system.

The work has been done at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona. An agile project form has been used in the work containing a prestudy, development, verification, experimentation and survey phase. The survey focused on smartphones for timing, and the experiments were qualitative. Three of the questions that have been answered during the work are, if Bluetooth could be used in a timing context, what are the difference in reading performance at different speeds and distances.

In both unobstructed and blocked Bluetooth can be read at longer distances. Both systems can read tags at 30 kilometers an hour close to the readers.