Hi, I set up an M6e Nano in a nice weather proof box and 3 connectors on the box for the antenna, power cable, and usb connection to a laptop. I have created my own software, using the ThingMagic C# SDK, to count and time laps on a local ski loop. I have a TV located about 30m past the antenna so that athletes can see their lap count, lap time, average lap time etc, as they pass by. The laptop is equipped with a wireless HDMI dongle, as is the TV: This allows me to setup the laptop and the TV without them having to be close to one another. I’m using this system for team training sessions and it is working great! However, I have to set up the laptop out in the cold every time because, even though the laptop connects to the TV wirelessly, I still have to cable the laptop to the reader via USB in order to receive the chip reads.
The outdoor reader is setup within wifi range and is just outside a window where I can have the laptop. This location for the laptop would also permit my wireless HDMI out to TV to continue working. I would like to not require the USB cable to go through the wall or to run out an open window or door. I think it would be really cool to have a raspberry pi or arduino shield wired to the M6e nano inside the weather proof box and have that device send reader data to my laptop via bluetooth or wifi. Does this make sense and does anyone have experience with this or have any guidance as to the best way to architect a system like that? Better yet, has it already been done?
First of all great work to see this. many others tried in the past. I hope you will share the setup on Github for others.
Long time ago (2017 - 2018) I worked on the M6E. The M7E is backward compatible, but has some more features.
I connected the M6E to a Raspberry PI and created different examples to connect between the Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu using either nodejs, Bluetooth or TCP communication.I also created an ESP32 server to connect on wifi.
I’ve got this all working now. I acquired an M7e Hecto, wired it via Tx/Rx to an Arduino ESP32 Nano and powered both from a bulkhead in my box that I can connect a 5v power supply to. Using the following project (I had already started to add the wifi arduino code to a few years ago and went back and got it working), I was able to get everything working with my existing C#/WPF UI that tracks laps, displays lap info for people crossing the lap line (all that code is in the same project). The UI app was already working with my SparkFun M6Enano, but will now connect to either the M6eNano via USB or the M7eHecto via Arduino wirelessly. I am very pleased with the result as it affords the following advantages for me:
I no longer have to take my laptop outside and connect it via USB cable to the reader. The laptop can sit inside in the warm and talk to the reader via Arduino over wifi.
The M7e is able to use the NA region for the antenna config and this, perhaps combined with other advantages, has increased the read range of the antenna considerably. As the winter has gone on and the snow has gotten deeper, the read range with the old M6e suffered to the point where skiers had to ski very close to the antenna for the reads to occur. With the M7e, you can ski down the middle of the trail and get good reads every time.