Testing RFID Readers

After initially testing the Phidget 1023 RFID reader, the Raspberry Pi was selected as the core for the cat feeder system. This meant the RFID reader would need to work on Linux Debian.

The Phidget 1023 tested already was then ready for testing on a Linux machine, this required installing the Phidget 21 library along with the python library. Once installed, example .py scripts were used to test the functionality. Below shows it working in Ubuntu and a tag being read.

However, when the libraries and Phidget RFID reader were migrated over to the Raspberry Pi, there was an issue with either compatibility or the RFID reader itself. This meant no tags would be recognised and in general nothing worked consistently. Therefore another RFID reader (Parallax RFID Reader, which can be seen below) was tested on the Raspberry Pi. This used a serial implementation and simply required the Serial port access library to operate. The device operated successfully on the Raspberry Pi, but did lack range - this is likely to be due to the lack in power from the Raspberry Pi's USB port.

Using the serial library, I was able to produce a simple python script that would search for a reading from the reader and would retrieve the tag's ID. This would later be used for the system cat recognition.

Update:
Below is a video demonstrating the implementation of setting up the RFID reader with the cat feeder:

References

https://youtu.be/6pXWhGzX4Fg

http://pyserial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/pyserial_api.html