magnetic card reader and writer raspberry pi swipe

#Magnetic card reader and writer raspberry pi swipe how to

You will need to wait a little bit while the raspi-config tool does its thing in enabling SPI.ĥ. You will now be asked if you want to enable the SPI Interface, select Yes with your arrow keys and press Enter to proceed. Now on this next screen, you want to use your arrow keys to select “ P4 SPI“, again press Enter to select the option once it is highlighted.Ĥ. Once you have this option selected, press Enter.ģ. On here use the arrow keys to select “ 5 Interfacing Options“. If you want a more in-depth look into these options, you can check out our raspi-config guide. This tool will load up a screen showing a variety of different options. Let’s begin by first opening the raspi-config tool, and we can do this by opening the terminal and running the following command. By default, the Raspberry Pi has the SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) disabled, which is a bit of a problem as that is what our RFID reader circuit runs through.ĭon’t worry though as it is fairly simple to re-enable this interface, just follow our steps below to configure your Raspberry Pi and Raspbian to utilize the SPI interface.ġ. Follow the table below, and check out our GPIO guide to see the positions of the GPIO pins that you need to connect your RC522 to.īefore we begin the process of utilizing the RFID RC522 on our Raspberry Pi, we will first have to make changes to its configuration. Wiring your RFID RC522 to your Raspberry Pi is fairly simple, with it requiring you to connect just 7 of the GPIO Pins directly to the RFID reader. You can either wire these directly to the GPIO Pins or like we did in this tutorial, plug the RFID RC522 into our Breadboard then wire from there to our Raspberry Pi’s GPIO Pins. We will need to wire all of these but the IRQ to our Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. On your RFID RC522 you will notice that there are 8 possible connections on it, these being SDA (Serial Data Signal), SCK (Serial Clock), MOSI (Master Out Slave In), MISO (Master In Slave Out), IRQ (Interrupt Request), GND (Ground Power), RST (Reset-Circuit) and 3.3v (3.3v Power In). With the header pins now soldered to your RFID circuit, it is now ready to use, and you can continue with the tutorial. We also recommend being careful with the amount of solder you apply.Ĥ. Remember it is best to heat the joint slightly before applying solder to it, this will ensure that the solder will adhere more to the joint and reduce the chances of creating a cold joint. Now using a hot soldering iron and some solder, slowly solder each of the pins. The breadboard will hold the pins tightly making it easier to solder them to the RFID RC522 circuit.ģ. One handy trick is to put the long side of the header pins into a breadboard and then putting the circuit over the top of the header pins.

Place the header pins up through the holes of your RC522. First off, if the header pins you received with your RC522 isn’t the correct size, then snap them down, so you only have a single row of eight pins.Ģ. The missing pins mean you will have to do it yourself, luckily soldering header pins is a rather simple task, even for beginners.ġ. One thing you will notice when purchasing an RFID RC522 Reader is that 90% of them don’t come with the header pins already soldered in.

#Magnetic card reader and writer raspberry pi swipe how to

If you would prefer a more thorough explanation on how to do everything then you can check out our written guide on setting up the RFID RC522 with your Raspberry Pi below.Īdblock blocking the video? Support us by subscribing to our ad-free service. Recommendedīelow we have a video showing you the process of setting up the RC522 on your Raspberry Pi including setting up all the circuitry.

Equipment Listīelow are all the bits and pieces that I used for this Raspberry Pi RFID RC522 tutorial. You can extend this tutorial to use something like a 16×2 LCD for the Raspberry Pi, handy if you want to show some information or display a visual prompt to the end user.

We will be showing you how to wire up the RC522 as well as showing you how to write Python scripts to interact with the chip so you can both read and write your RFID Tags. Make sure that the tags you purchase for your RFID RC522 operate on the 13.56MHz frequency otherwise we will fail to read them.

This microcontroller provides its data through the SPI protocol and works by creating a 13.56MHz electromagnetic field that it uses to communicate with the RFID tags. The RFID RC522 is a very low-cost RFID (Radio-frequency identification) reader and writer that is based on the MFRC522 microcontroller. This project is a cool circuit to play around with and opens you up to quite a wide variety of different projects from using it as an attendance system to using it to open a lock.