That’s a Propeller microcontroller board with a few resistors and capacitors on it. Just add a coil of wire, and you have an RFID reader. Here’s a picture of it scanning my corporate ID badge, and displaying the badge’s 512 bits of content on a portable TV screen:
If you’re into that sort of thing, I wrote a forum post with technical details and pretty oscilloscope screenshots.
yay
Sweet =D how far away can it succeed at reading the cards? NIST uses those LF cards to control access too. I’ve heard some stories about success reading them from a meter or so through big stone walls, given a large well-matched coil and a good amount of power
-Dan
Re: yay
Hiya Dan!
I think my max read distance is about an inch or two. It will read with the card still in my wallet and I don’t have to press it completely up against the wood block.. but it’s certainly not a long distance RFID reader. This design wasn’t really striving for maximum performance, given that there are no active components at all
I might have to try giving it a real amplifier for generating the carrier, tuning my coil a bit better, and adding a fast comparator for doing signal detection. With those improvements, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could get 6 inches or so. Maybe if I’m lucky, a whole foot?
–Micah