This wine rack must be the smartest rack around.

“WineM is a Technology Sketch of a smart wine rack. It’s designed to locate wines in a wine rack using RFIDs attached to bottles and to display which wines have been located using LED backlights behind the bottles. Collectors (or anyone with a large wine cellar) can use it to search through collections, track the location of specific bottles and manage inventory with a minimum of data entry. Linking bottles to networked databases can provide information that would otherwise be too time consuming or difficult to obtain (for example, the total value of a collection, or all the wine that is ready to drink).

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The core technology is an RFID reader that is installed in each of the cells in the wine rack. These readers identify what RFID, and thus what bottle, is in what cell, so that it can be located and managed. If a bottle is removed, the total valuation of the rack can be instantly decremented; if that bottle is put back, the value adjusts to its original value automatically. In this way, the focus stays on the wine, rather than the record-keeping. Each RFID is associated with a specific wine, and all the metadata that goes along with that wine (varietal, vintage, country, region, etc.) by scanning the UPC barcode on the side of the bottle and associating that barcode with the specific RFID. Not every bottle has a UPC barcode, but most do, as it’s defined by the winery. Many UPC databases exist (free ones include UPC Database and UPC Wiki), which can help resolve the specifics of which wine is in the bottle, and then wine databases can be accessed with that information to get at the rest of the information (maybe by linking to the ISWN, though that standard does not seem to be in broad use).”

Via: Todbot