dudegalea

Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson ran a great RFID workshop at ETech 2009.

As the description on the page says:

Ever wanted to get a real understanding of how RFID works? In this workshop, you’ll learn about the different classes of RFID devices. We’ll discuss what RFID can and can’t do, what devices are already on the market, and what kinds of future applications are possible. Then, using your own RFID reader and an Arduino microcontroller, you’ll learn how to move data from the tag to the screen to the database. You’ll learn how to read to and write from tags, and how creative thinking about RFID reader antennas can lead to all new devices.

And that’s exactly what we did.

The first task was to assemble the RFID read/write module and antenna on the breadboard.

With this circuit connected to the computer via a USB cable, it was possible to read a MIFARE RFID tag.

The next step was to write to the tag, and read the information back.

The next (slightly more tricky) task was to use a Mini Arduino board to host a small application that could read the RFID tag. The point of this is that the circuit then becomes independent from the computer; you can make a self-contained box that can read tags.

I chose the lazy method of just moving a few wires, while leaving the bulk of the circuit where it was, and adding the Arduino board below the RFID module.

Uploading the application to the Arduino was fairly simple. The GUI app running on the laptop (in Processing) simply takes the tag id, and looks it up in the ETech profile database. (The tag was associated with my profile during  conference registration.)

(I’m skipping over the problem caused by the fact that I hadn’t uploaded a photo to my profile page, and the GUI app didn’t handle this. A quick commenting-out of the relevant code fixed the problem.)

And here it is. The Arduino board is running an app that grabs the tag id. This is passed to the GUI app that then looks up the associated ETech profile and displays it.

This was a good fun workshop which served as a great introduction to both RFID and Arduino.

The code and circuits for this project are available at Tom’s site.

More on the same tutorial from The Daily ACK.