Get back something physical in this increasingly virtual world. The latest experiment of “I Miss My Pencil” (embedded below) really struck a chord with me. It allows you to store music digitally and still have an analogue way of interacting with them. I had been thinking of ripping my entire CD collection and replacing it with a set of RFID-enabled cards for a while. The idea is that you pick a card, touch it to the reader and the music starts playing. So I set about to figure out what it takes to create an RFID interface.
It looks like one of the easiest ways to get started is building on the Arduino platform. Arduino allows you to quickly prototype small electronic circuitry. There are tons and tons of tutorials, projects and examples available, and you can get a platform for which you don’t need any kind of additional hardware (no need to solder or any additional interfaces)
RFID allows you to identify wirelessly any object that contains a tag. A tag does not need to be powered if you’re working over short distances. Parallax offers a RFID reader that can be connected to the Arduino.
For about €100 you can buy both an Arduino starters kit and the RFID reader. It won’t give you all the options the C60 project has, but you’ll have a solid foundation to get started which doesn’t require creating your own breadboards and soldering everything together.
If you live in Europe, Antratek Electronics looks like it has a wide range of electronics components (including the two mentioned above). I haven’t ordered with them yet, so I can’t just their customer support.
As you might have noticed, this January on Streamhead is all about gathering ideas. Some I’m going to pursue, some will end up in the long list of “someday/maybe”. This one, I have no idea how it will turn out. My interest in hardware started with the Tandy electronic project kits and continued in my higher eduction with courses on microelectronics and processor design.
However, my job choices have always been in high level software development, where the hardware is hidden away by countless layers of abstraction. It’s certainly not a choice I regret, I slightly regret not having done anything with electronics in the last 10 years. Over the years, I’ve amassed countless of electronics projects that I’d love to do sometime.
2011 might be that time.