How Daniel Terdiman built a RFID Device
[Source: CNET Networks]
I’m staring at a table covered in circuitry, a solderless “breadboard,” a bunch of wire, an antenna, and some other components–all the things I’ve been given to build a rudimentary RFID reader–and I’m having serious thoughts about whether I’m in the right room.
I’ve certainly used RFID before–tiny radio frequency ID tags are increasingly showing up in everything from grocery store items to hospital wristbands to lift tickets. But the sum total of electronics that I’ve made in my life is, I’m now reminding myself, zero.
And yet, over the next three hours, I’ve got to take all these various bits and pieces and craft them into something that not only reads an RFID tag, but also can detect and store the serial numbers of up to 102 of them in resident memory. And do so while sitting pretty much front and center of a room full of other people who seem to me very confident in their ability to complete the same task.
I’m here at ETech, the Emerging Technology conference, and I’m sitting in on a session called “Hands-on RFID for Makers.”….
