How about tennis rackets as RFID reader?

Filed in archive Tags and Readers on September 26, 2007

My friend Mark had been invited to attend Mediamatic's RFID & Physical Computing Hackers Camp and for this event he decided to do something different. So he got ahead and got some old tennis rackets which he painted them black and took them along to Amsterdam. You must be wondering what he would do with tennis rackets? Play tennis? Not really!! Rackets are not always used for playing tennis and this you will realize after reading this post further.




Now after rackets he got hold of some SunMicro RFID readers and an alarm clock but this probably didn't work out. He then got hold of some buzzers and beepers to complete the job but these RFID readers didn't work when connected to 5 volt USB-power and a seek rag command was all that was needed to set it right. After this it was decided to use these readers with RFID skimmers which is another of Willem's project as data could not be collected in standalone mode and the rackets were needed to be connected to a laptop to make them work. At the end of the day he connected a transistor to one if the LEDs on the reader and soldered an extra wire to the USB power supply for beepers and buzzers.

It seems Mark had some real good time and learnt a lot too from it and as a result we got tennis rackets which could serve as RFID reader.