RFID freak

1.) Exporting

The last 3 Mikey devices were sent to Rconty in France, Izico & Nemo in China and to Eric P in Canada. They all came with the antenna from Roel, this one from SonMicro.

Here are some pictures of Mikeys with antenna’s assembled. The one of Izico front and back and the one of RConty front and back.

And here is a high res picture of mine. It’s not to show of the super quality soldering work (wink) it’s more to give people the opportunity to check if their device arrived without parts missing.

2.) Coding

I would have liked to have made more progress in this field. Not much has been going on. I’ve not been able to get a Mikey going with Eclipse and all the Open Source tools. Instead I had to commit a sin and use IAR. It’s not open but it’s easy to use and for a dumbo like me that’s my tool It comes with a lot of exaples and I’ve managed to rewrite the Board file for the Mikey, at least partly. And I’ve got there ‘ getting started’ app to work. A few leds blink every x milliseconds, pressing the button generates an interrupt and that triggers the blinking of another led. Pretty easy to do.

3.) On to the next

The plans for the next version become more clear.

• Switch CPU. It’ll be the SE version of the SAM7 which has native support for all kinds of memory.
• Hence add a NAND flash. 2Gbit is dirt cheap and more then enough to store cards and logos.
• Add a touch screen. Thanks to Izico I’ve managed to get my hands on 20 touch screens, 320 by 240 pixels with 64k colors on  2.4 inch. They are a sweet bunch. More info here.
• Add good vibrations. A small vibrating motor for that extra kick.
• Add a lo-freq emulator, like this one and a lo-freq reader with this chip from Melexis; my fellow countrymen.
• And of course clean up the bugs like make SAM-BA work, use an A/D port to measure the voltage on the battery, take R6 away and last but not least communicate with PN532 via either HSU, SPI or I2C.

4.) Produced some wetware
Next to some neat hardware there’s also some cool wetware coming. It’s going to be delivered around the end of May or the beginning of June. He or she will be the coolest thing around … no Mikey in sight

That’s about it.

Cheers,
Tom