The Geek Movement

After failing to get some critical parts ordered, ordering the wrong part, and burning out a Lilypad main board within about 2 seconds of wiring it up, Team Tanenbaum was feeling a bit discouraged about their hardware prototyping skills.  But we forged ahead nonetheless, setting aside the now-fragile-seeming Lilypad for the moment and working with the more robust and idiot-proof Arduino Duemilanove (a board name, btw, that seems guaranteed to be misspelled, thus complicating efforts to search for posts about it in help forums, blogs, etc).  Our primary goal was to get the Innovations ID-12 RFID reader working with it.  We can fake/adapt to a lot of technological problems with our proposed system, but the rfid reader is basically the core functionality.Through shameless stealing and recombining of a series of helpful blog posts, we finally achieved some success and got the reader to read cards and output the id numbers via the arduino’s serial monitor.  Here’s the resources we relied on:

http://blog.formatlos.de/2008/12/08/arduino-id-12/

The wiring diagram given there is for the Arduino mini, and the comments indicate that the code wouldn’t work on the Duemilanove, but the diagram at least gave us a starting point for understanding how to wire the reader to an Arduino.

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/ID12

Next we found the code given here, which we copied and pasted without a single change and which functioned perfectly.  The code referenced wiring diagrams by a specific person, so that was the final piece of the puzzle.

http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/resources/rfid_id12_tagreader/

The wiring info here combined with the code above worked like a charm.  Some pictures of our setup are below.  Josh soldered the ID-12 chip and a set of long wires to the RFID breakout board.  We wanted to keep the chip as low-profile as possible since it will eventually be mounted on the palm.  The wires will be trimmed when we construct the final circuit, but we gave ourselves plenty of length to play with in the meantime.  We were able to read not only the large cards that were recommended with the reader, but also the tags that came with the phidget reader kit purchased earlier.