RFID Reader on A20 with Android

[flofs]

Hi,
is it possible to use any of olimex RFID readers with the A20 and Android. https://www.olimex.com/Products/Modules/RFID/

or can u suggest me any RFID reader which is working with Android on the A20?

Thanks

[dave-at-axon]

It looks like these devices appear as COM ports to the system. As long as the underlying Android OS sees this and allocates a ttyUSBx device to them, you should be able to use the SerialPort API that's on the Internet to talk to them.

You'll need the Android NDK to build the library and make any changes to the JNI to work with your code. I've gotten I2C and GPIO at present to work and now looking at the serial port stuff next week.

[flofs]

Thanks for the reply!

I found some other posibilities like GPIOs u mentioned and UART.
Is it possible to access UART without NDK?
I would like to use sth. like that http://www.exp-tech.de/Shields/125Khz-RFID-module-UART.html

[dave-at-axon]

There is no access to serial ports under Android without a JNI (Need the NDK to build them). Olimex have a very basic library (and even that is developed with the NDK to create a JNI) for UART but the one on the web is much better as it gives you a file descriptor (fd) to use in your Android code.

The serial port stuff you can get from here.

https://code.google.com/p/android-serialport-api/source/checkout

Not sure which cards you want to read, but to use the same as NFC on phone, look for the 13.56Mhz readers instead. Often called Mifare.

[zokl]

Hi,
is it possible to use any of olimex RFID readers with the A20 and Android. https://www.olimex.com/Products/Modules/RFID/

or can u suggest me any RFID reader which is working with Android on the A20?

Thanks

Hello,

Yes you can use it if you switch the reader to hid mode. In hid mode it works like keyboard. It send the tag i fo to actual position of the cursor.

Which kind of rfid reader does you want to use? I try both models of 13,56 MHz but they are very poor quality. The firmware is ok but the antena part is very poor. The read range is about 5 mm. To improve it you must modify the antena part with capacitor. With the modification i am able to read the tag on 2cm distance. The other problem is big power consuption. If you use hub between pc ar olimex board withou external power adaptor then you have a problem. The reader does not works. It must be connectet directly to pc or olimex board or to hub with external adaptor.