For us the hardest part of any project is coming up with the seminal idea. Once in a while you just need to cheat by recreating an existing product. That’s what EngineersGarage did with this toll plaza project. If you take a look around the various tabs at the top of that article you’ll see that they’ve used an 8051 microcontroller to bring together a character LCD, RFID reader, and a keypad. From there it’s a slew of coding to add the functionality for reading multiple tags, looking up stored value, and creating a replenishment system. Sure, it’s not really of much use in this form, but it’ll give you something to do with those shiny parts you have sitting around, and it might just lead you down a path to something more meaningful. As usual, there’s a demonstration video of this after the break.
If this doesn’t float your boat, perhaps this other RFID access system is more your thing.
