RFID Reader

The goal: to develop a small, self-contained Arduino-based RFID card reader that logs scans with a date-stamp.

Equipment

• Arduino Uno R3
• Adafruit datalogger
• Adafruit 13.56MHz RFID reader/writer
• LDC panel

Progress

13.56MHz reader

• Assembled it
• Assembled LCD panel
• Installed drivers
• Tested on supplied cards and Cambridge ID: works
• Can read UID on card. Appears in Hex format.
• Cannot use QMUL card. Appears to work on a different frequency.

QMUL Card

• Talked to David Dunstan who suggested I get in touch with Martin Evans (m.d.t.evans@qmul.ac.uk) from IT.

• Martin used a pcProx unit from rfideas.com. The model number on the back is RDR-6081AKU.

• From here the RDR-6081AKU appears to be a 125 KHz card reader. So the QMUL ID cards must be 125 KHz cards.

125 KHz readers

• Reader from Seeedstudio (USD13.50) (DISCONTINUED)

• 125 KHz ID tags (USD2)

• Grove - 125KHz RFID Reader (USD12.90)

• Grove Wiki

There is a Wiki page for this reader here and an Instructables page here.

Another possibility is the reader from Parallax:

• RFID Read/Write Module, Serial

• Compatible RFID cards

Potential Problem

The card UID is not the student ID. It is not clear to me if we will be able to read the student ID. In this case, there may be a problem as while we will have the card UID and date/time stamps, we will be unable to correlate this information with an actual student.

A possible work-around is a one-time registration step when we make our own database of card UID <-> Student ID/Name matches. This could be done by hand or with the help of a bar-code scanner as the student ID is stored as a bar code on the card.

Why not use a bar code scanner for everything? It's bulky.