RFID tag reader with ARM microcontroller

   Good afternoon makers, and welcome back to Embedded-Clovis blog. Today I will show you one of the first steps in the make of my Chip Tag for every running club (click here) project: the RFID tag reader. It is a part of a Hackaday prize project I am in, so I think it is important to share it with you.

   RFID stands for Radio-Frequency identification and is a technology that reads/writes tag's (cards, keychains, tokens) contactless (by air); it may or may not feature a power supply in the target device, and when it doesn't have a power supply the energy for the target comes from the air as well (from the host device).

   I bought the module RFID-RC522 breakout board from a random seller on eBay, that features a MFRC522 RFID chip from NXP working on 13.56MHz; I also bought some programmable RFID cards/keychains for testing: the MIFARE 1K . I haven't tested recording data on it but this is surely the next step in my journey (since I will need that on my "Chip tag for runner's" project. 

   The schematic of my project can be seen below, featuring a Freescale FRDM-K64F development board, a RFID-RC522 module and an USB cable connected to my PC. Every time a card is ready (in a 2-3 centimeters range) its data is sent to a serial console on PC: I am using the Arduino IDE console on this project. 

click in the image to Enlarge

The wiring is done as follow: 

MFRC522 SPI_MOSI => PTD2 port of my board

MFRC522 SPI_MISO => PTD3 port of my board

MFRC522 SPI_SCK => PTD1 port of my board

MFRC522 SPI_CS => PTE25 port of my board

MFRC522 MF_RESET => PTD0 port of my board

MFRC522 3.3V => 3.3V of my board

MFRC522 GND => GND of my board

   There is a test code on GitHub here,  for reading tags and sending its information to the serial console of a PC. It is important to mention here that most of the code was taken from libraries and examples created by other users on the mBed platform (please refer to the GitHub link above for credit information).

   This was only the first step on the development of my summer project (Chip tag for running clubs), but I am sure it will help people get started with RFID technology. Having any question or concern, please contact me via Twitter: @ClovisDuino  or e-mail: clovisduino AT gmail .com . See you guys next time; have fun hacking and making!.