RFID freak

I promissed to make some more pages on the femto’s I have. However I’ve not managed to do so

Yesterday I desoldered two heat dispensors and discovered the picochip PC302. I’m wondering what those four test points (TP4, TP5, TP7 and TP8) are on the right of the PC302. You can see them best in picture 9702.

Next to that I’m wondering why the MX25L1608E has all that resin poured over it. According to the datasheet it’s a secure flash chip with a 512 unique ID.  As far as I can tell it’s in a 8-WSON format.

Ooh, almost forgot; here are the pictures: Sure Signal 2 Decapped.

Cheers,

Tom

Just for fun I’ve bought a Sure Signal 2 on E-bay for cheap (less then 50 euro, including shipping)

It’s actually an Alcatel Lucent 9361 Home Cell V2-V, part number 3JR09110ABBA

Here are some pictures from it.

Find 10 free PCB design tools here:

http://www.printedcircuitsboards.com/software/67/10-pcb-design-layout-software.html

And a free antenna design tool here:

http://electroschematics.com/835/rfsim99-download/

and thanks to Gert I’ve got another one here:

http://www.eznec.com/

They might be better then Sonnet, Agilent EM Pro or Altium, or they might not.

In any case they are cheaper

And here is something to read:

http://books.google.nl/books?q=related:ISBN076457910X

Cheers,

Tom

Hello,

Roel managed to compile LibNFC agains the e-cos3 build environement.

Debug messages not included and all output to stdout.

Get the linkable binary here.

libnfc.a.tar.gz

Cheers,

Tom

The workshop given by P. Teuwen was fun.
Just hanging with Roel and Fabien and Francis and the guys from the RevSpace is always fun.

For those who are still interested in the project:
- ecos is running
- serial coms with the PN works
- libnfc port configures but aurt.c needs adjusting to compile….

Cheers,
Tom

I’d like to let everyone who has received a baked Mikeycard  phase 1 spin 2 card to know that it there is a simple fix to get the board to power over USB. The pull-down resistors connected to D0, D1 and D2 lines of the LTC4088 LiPo charger IC are too large so that the lines are never go low. The fix is to replace R27, R28 and R29 with smaller value resistors. I’ve replaced the 10k originals with 1K value resistors and the board now powers up immediately when plugged into USB.

The explanation for the original behaviour  can be found on Table 1 on Page 11 of the datasheet. With the original resistors the D0, D1, and D2 lines are all high thus the LiPo IC is in 2.5mA (Susp High) mode which is insufficient power to boot the CPU, obviously. I measured ~0.8V on plugging in a USB cable to my board with the original pull-down resistors in place. The datasheet indicates on Page 4 indicated that V(IL), that is Input Low Voltage maximum for D0, D1 and D2 is 0.4V.

The pull-down resistors must pull-down D0, D1, and D2 to an acceptable low logic voltage on USB plug-in. Fix your three pull-downs and you’ll now have a board that boots when plugged into USB power only.

Eric

Hi,

In the past few weeks we have:
- added dgbUART to the board;
via E6 and E7 you can get some feedback from the board over a serial FTDI cable.
- found out what kept the board from running on USB only;
cutting the wire from R27 to the CPU is rather drastic but works.  I would like to find a nicer solution.

Yesterday I’ve done a particular good thing that is to the benefit of the whole human race. The guys at RevSpace, your friendly hackerspace here in The Hague, had some carcasses of CBM64 machines lying around.  We managed to get one machine in a (somewhat) working state again. SYS64372 forever!

Cheers,

Tom

26C3

December,  pure white snow, the red guy with the big beard and a thousand other reasons are good to organize a get-together with a few like minded (RFID) enthusiasts.

I hope to speak / see / write them all coming Saturday. We’re having a virtual Skype and IRC meeting starting at twelve GMT.

Next to that I’ll be going to watch the dragons in Berlin between Christmas and New Years. That’s going to be lots of fun. I’m hoping to have a face2face and beer2beer meet with Roel , Henryk , Eric, Andrei and hopefully Pavol too. That would be great!

Drop a line if you want to join.

Cheers,

Tom

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