Aneal Khimani

Early this morning (after my first smoke of the day) I hit up one of my favorite electronics/hacking websites hackaday.com. I was reading the new posts and I saw one from a couple days back that said Radio Shack (of all places) had a good price on a Parallax RFID reader. Thinking this was some sort of hoax (since “The Shack” never has good prices). I took a ride out to my local store.

Now I remember a few months ago I saw that same RFID reader in a package with no price on it. I asked the dude at the desk to price check it for me, and it was just as I thought, 50 bucks. Well there was no way I was gonna pay that, so I left it alone.

Well today that same item rang up for $9.97. Yes, ten bucks! Needless to say I bought all of them that they had remaining in stock (and I might even trawl a couple of other close by Shacks to buy them out as well).

Well I got them home and tore into one right away. The device is pretty slick, compact and easy to use and comes with two pre-programmed tags. It has a built in bi-color LED to display the status of the reader (red or green for enabled or disabled). Only four connections too (Vcc or +5 volts, Ground, Serial Out and Enable). The output pins on the reader are males, and they are breadboard compatible (which is how I hooked mine up).

Here’s the pin connections:

Vcc on Reader to +5volts on Arduino
Enable on Reader to digital pin 2 on Arduino
Serial Out on Reader to RX on Arduino
Ground on Reader to Ground on Arduino

Easy as that (though remember, you’ll have to disconnect the RX pin from Arduino when it’s time to upload your sketch, or you’ll get errors and no action).

Well a quick search through the Arduino playground netted me a pretty damn simple sketch that reads the card (if one is close by) and displays the card code in the Serial Monitor. Here’s the link to that tutorial. Had it up and running in less than 10 minutes. Now if I can only figure out what to do with this new technology (well, it’s new to me at least).

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