RFID Transplant

[Zach Charat] didn’t want to carry around yet another card with him so he transplanted the RFID guts from his card to his phone. Soaking the card in nail polish remover for twelve hours got him nowhere, but when he broke out the acetone the card was falling apart in 30 seconds. Above you can see the tiny chip and loop antenna that were left after ditching the plastic. The black bits are electrical tape which he then used to embed this in his Palm Pre’s touchstone charger plate ( which we just saw this in a hack last week).

This works, and while you’re waiting for the world to implement the Leeloo Dallas Multipass it’s a great solution.

[Thanks Coveredwagonkid via Pre Central]

21 thoughts on “RFID Transplant

  1. Very cool. The regular Palm back would probably work just as well.
    I wounder if you could up more than one chip in and have it work?
    The downside? Well if you ever want to sell your cell phone you may want to get a new back or cancel your card.
    Boy would it be nice to just have one multipass card that did everything.

  2. I don’t get it. Is 0.76mm really too thick to carry around? Why not just TAPE the card to the phone?

    Color me impressed when someone finally rolls the whole thing up into a glass vial and inserts it in their hand.

  3. Acetone is great stuff. One thing though, don’t get too cocky while playing around with it in combination with a lighter. Not that I would know any reason why or anything…

  4. people who post albums on FaceBook and link them on their blogs/forums/etc should be stabbed in the face. If I dont have a FB account now, what makes you think your shit is so amazing that I would create one just to see your link. There are plenty of good FREE and PUBLIC album sharing sites. Fuck Off.

  5. Does anyone know if Acetone leaves any chemical residue behind after evaporation? I used some to extract the active ingredient from Salvia Divinorum, but I do not feel comfortable ingesting it due to the possibility of residual chemicals left over. Yeah I know this is not the right place for this, but i figure, what the hell…

  6. Not sure about Acetone, my gut feeling says that it’s probably not safe. For extractions of things that I may be putting in my body (Salvinorin A, THC, etc), I usually use diethyl ether, much safer (and evaporates VERY quickly), but hard to find unless you have access to chemistry equipment from a university or something.

  7. @ xeracy

    unless your acetone is of very high purity i wouldnt injest it. solvent is sometimes stabilised with nasty compounds to prevent reaction/photochemical degradation etc.

  8. Just a warning. I did this same thing with a crap HTC touch about a year ago. Initial fittings seemed to work perfectly, over time the backing slowly cracked leaving a chunk of paint missing where the wires had raised it ever-so-slightly.

    I can confirm, though, that this was indeed a worthwhile hack. Not only space-saving, but I eliminated one more thing to forget in the morning.

  9. People in London have been doing this with there oyster cards for years i use my iphone 3g and might put one in my iphone 4 soon and most of my friends keep them in wristbands or in the battery compartment of a watch

  10. Cut the unnecessary part off and put it on your keychain with your other grocery store cards, etc.
    or
    Leave it in your front pants pocket and dry hump the reader lol.
    win-win

  11. Hmmm, we have cards for our workplace, and cos our estates dept is so shit, they stuck with the old magnetic strip system for some locks, and the rfid chip for others. So our cards have both.
    What would happen if I acetone my staff card!? :-)

  12. Acetone makes the magnetic strip come right off immediately. It won’t be terrible usable any more…

    Seems like metal stuffs with the RFID signal. For phones with a metal body such as the Moto DROID, it seems this won’t work.

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