Since our library at work has opened a down stairs sweat shop to put RFID tags into all our quadrizillion books I obviously came up with the idea to play around with said tags. They are from 3M and as far as I can tell just basic RFID tags, nothing fancy or tricky. If I would have had more time a few months ago I could have done this a bit earlier and would probably have picked up that 3M messed up the tags for the first few thousand books!
The Project:
Initially I wanted to build up an RFIDuino (http://rfid.marcboon.com/) but it has been replaced with the StrongLink SL018 so I got myself one SL018 (www.stronglink.cn/english/sl018.htm) and since the provided library also supports it it’s nice little brother the SL030 (www.stronglink.cn/english/sl030.htm) as well (I’m a sucker for miniaturised versions of stuff ;). Ordered both from www.rfidshop.net and have just started to setup a prototype to read/write to some of the tags I pinched from our library and the few free RFID cards I got with the readers.
More ideas:
Since I want to have a reason to buy one of those Redpark Arduino->Iphone cables (http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MSRP02) I’m planning to make the Arduino talk to the RFID tags and then pass the string through to the iPhone to talk back to our library backend. It would be much nicer if this could talk through bluetooth rather than the cable but for a prototype this should be more than sufficiently pretty. The prototype should also show how easy it is to clone one of our tags.