RFID Jukebox For The Kids

March 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Dominik] built a fun musical toy for his daughter [Anna]. It’s a jukebox that lets her play her favorite tunes using RFID tags to select between them.

The project is simple, yet robust. The enclosure is a wooden craft box that you can pick up for a couple of bucks. Inside there’s an Arduino with a Wave Shield which handles the audio playback. An RFID reader takes input from the set of card-tags he procured. An internal Lithium battery powers the device, with a USB port for charging.

Sure, those guts have some cost involved in them. But there’s no LCD which can be broken, and we thing the boards will hold up well to abuse if mounted correctly. Plus there’s a lot of future potential here. When we saw the cards we thought of those toys which make the animal sounds (“what does the cow say… mooo”). This could be used for that with really young children. Then repurposed into this jukebox as they get a bit older. If you put the guts in a new enclosure it will appear to be a brand-new toy, right?

See a demo of the project in the clip after the break.

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RFID Reader Gets User Inputs And Smart Card Write Capability

February 9, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Navic] added a slew of abilities to his RFID reader. It’s now a full-featured RFID reader and smart card writer with extras. When we looked at it last time the unit was just an RFID and smart card reader in a project enclosure. You could see the RFID code of a tag displayed on the LCD screen, but there wasn’t a lot more to it than that.

The upgrade uses the same project enclosure but he’s added four buttons below the display. These allow him to access the different features that he’s implemented. The first one, which is shown in the video after the break, allows him to store up to six tags in the EEPROM of the Basic Stamp which drives the unit. He can dump these tag codes to a smart card (pictured above), but also has the option of interfacing with a PC to read from and write to that card.

We don’t think you can directly write RFID tags with the device, but we could be wrong.

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Securing Your Keurig With RFID

January 4, 2012 by Mike Nathan 42 Comments

keurig-hacking

[Andrew Robinson] and his co-workers are lucky enough to have a Keurig coffee maker in their office, though they have a hard time keeping track of who owes what to the community coffee fund. Since K-Cups are more expensive than bulk coffee, [Andrew] decided that they needed a better way to log everyone’s drinking habits in order to know who needs to cough up the most cash at the end of the month.

He started by tearing down the Keurig B40, making note of the various PCBs inside while identifying the best way to go about hacking the device. The coffee maker is controlled by a PIC, and rather than try to re-engineer things from the bottom up, he left the core of the machine intact and focused on the control panel instead.

He disconnected all of the unit’s buttons from the control board, routing them through an Arduino before reconnecting them to the machine. This essentially rendered the machine inoperable unless triggered by the Arduino, giving [Andrew] control over the brewing process. He wired in an RFID reader from SparkFun, then got busy coding his security/inventory system. Now, when someone wants coffee, they merely need to swipe their office access card over the machine, which enables the use of its control panel.

As you can see in the video below the system seems to work well. If we were to offer some constructive criticism, we would suggest ditching the laptop and rolling the RFID reading/verification into the Arduino instead – other than that, we think it’s great.

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Geared System Adds RFID To Regular Door Locks

December 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Flowolf] added an auto-locking RFID entry system to his front door. He used our favorite fabrication system, acrylic and threaded rod (we also like to throw in aluminum angle bracket from time to time). The support structure mounts underneath the escutcheon plate for the lockset, keeping the main acrylic sheet flat against the door.

An RFID reader and Arduino run the system, with a button inside to unlock the door. But if power were to fail, you will still be able to get in or out manually. When you are using the electronic system, a stepper motor connected to the geared lock knob by a chain is what grants access, then revokes it again five seconds later. The wire going up out of the this image is for a switch that lets the unit sense when the door is closed.

As shown in the video after the break, you can turn the auto-lock feature off. But we’d like to see an emergency entry feature, like a knock-based lock, because eventually you will leave without your keys!

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Getting Useful Data From A Dirt Cheap RFID Reader

November 19, 2011 by Mike Nathan 21 Comments

cheap-rfid-reader

[Aaron] was looking for a cheap RFID reader that had some easy to follow documentation and a standardized interface. Most everything he saw was pretty expensive, so he decided to buy a cheap $10 reader from eBay to see how easy it would be to work with.

The reader came with very little documentation, but [Aaron] did know that the device identifies itself as a USB keyboard, outputting scan tag data into a text editor. That functionality wasn’t incredibly useful, so he took it apart to see if he could interface with it in some other manner. Exposing the PCB revealed an unknown IC for which he could find no documentation, but the board did include some breakout pins, so [Aaron] started by probing those for data.

He tried reading the data in both a terminal program and with a logic analyzer, but nothing seemed to make a whole lot of sense. He turned the sampling rate of the sniffer down, and things started looking a little better. After comparing the data from the sniffer with known tag codes, he noticed that each digit had an offset of 39 applied, so he whipped up a bit of code to correct the numbers.

[Aaron] did a good amount of legwork to get usable data from the reader, but at a cost of $10 it can’t be beat. We certainly know what we’re going to be hunting for on eBay this afternoon…

Jarvis Opens The Door At P-Space

November 10, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

It seems like every Hackerspace should have some type of kludged together access system on their entry door. [Vasilis] wrote in to share the system called Jarvis that controls access to P-Space, a Hackerspace in Patras, Greece. It’s an RFID-based system that offers a few nice features.

They already have a server running the webpage, so basing their entry system off of a computer was an easy option. You can get in one of two ways; by presenting your valid RFID tag to a reader at the front door, or by ringing the bell and having a member inside press the Big Button of Doom (BBoD) which is a wireless controller.

The BBoD has an Xbee module inside which lets it send an unlock command back to the computer. The remote is powered by two AA batteries, and since it’s never on unless the button is pressed the team estimates these batteries should last around one year.

There’s even a feedback system. The computer posts the last few events to the webpage. So you can go online and see when the BBoD was used, or who’s tag has recently unlocked the entrance to tell if your friends are there.

RFID Reading And Spoofing

November 10, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

Locks are always temporary hindrances. After deciding to open the RFID-secured lock in his department, [Tixlegeek] built a device to read and spoof RFID tags (French, Google translate here).

The system is built around an ATMega32 microcontroller with a 16×2 LCD display. A commercial RFID reader module takes care of all the sniffing/cloning duties, and a small modulation circuit handles pumping those bits over to a lock. Right now, the spoofer can only handle reading and spoofing 125kHz RFID tags with no encryption or authorization. A tag that’s more complex than the duct tape RFID tag doesn’t work.

[Tixlegeek]’s little project does open up a few interesting avenues of exploring stuff that’s most certainly illegal. A smaller version of the project could be emplaced near a door or other RFID reader and left to crack a lock with a 32+62 bit password at 125 kilohertz. It wouldn’t be the fastest safecracker in the business, but it would work automatically as long as there is power.

If you’ve got any other ideas on what [Tixlegeek]’s RFID spoofer could do, leave a note in the comments.