SparkFun Simultaneous RFID Reader

Other Miscellaneous
1

I had a technical question regarding the SparkFun Simultaneous RFID Reader - M6E Nano SEN-14066.

I am currently designing a project for a class that involves this RFID Reader, I have not purchased it yet, because I wanted to verify that it would be ideal for our project, as well as get some advice on most compatible antennas.

The microcontroller we are using is an RP2040 (RPi Pico) on a custom PCB and the current plan is to simply connect the Reader via the UART RX and TX pins, as well as common ground. I know the board is built to work seamlessly with Arduino platforms, so any advice would be appreciated. As we are all still in school, and it is an expensive reader, we were hoping you could help us to know if this would work for our project.

Any advice on most compatible antennas would also be very helpful.

2

A couple of thoughts :

  1. I have not seen source code that is ready to program a Pico. Not in the C##/C SDK nor Pico Python. I have seen it for Python , but is a layer on top of a larger Mercury API running on Linux or Windows. I expect it will take a lot of time for coding and testing.

  2. Next to RX/TX/GND a strong power supply is very important. The ME6 is very sensitive to that and it works in bursts, thus it needs good strong capacitors to handle. A Wall wart will not do the job.

  3. With an external antenna normally higher readPower. This does not only reiterate point 2 about the strong power supply but also a point about cooling. The ME6 gets “hot” very quickly and stops working at 85C. Consider a good cooling block and maybe a fan.

  4. For external antenna Sparkfun has a good option https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14131.

I do not know what the purpose is of the school project or what needs to be achieved/proven to be successful, but personally, it looks like “an uphill battle”. Not so much the hardware, but especially the issue around the driver and examples source code (point 1 above) is challenging.

3

I see, thank you for the quick reply. Do you have any possible suggestions for a separate reader provided by SparkFun that would be better suited to work with a Pico? How about using an Arduino as an interface between the Pico and the Reader?

4

It all comes down to the solution you need to build for your school project. An Arduino in between is possible.

The M6ENano from Sparkfun fits on top of an Uno (make sure the FTDI pins don’t short-circuit on the Uno USB connector).

You can set the UART switch to SW and then you can use the TX/RX pin 0 and 1 for communicating to the PICO.

Keep the speed between M6E Nano and Arduino low as it will use SoftwareSerial.

Still, keep in mind the remarks about the power supply. The power from an Arduino is limited to 1A (given the diode on the board). you will need to provide direct extra power to the M6E Nano board (e.g. battery connection)

5

Does your product require reading gen3 UHF tags? If not it might be easier to use a more simple reader that has a shorter range. If you can make do with an inch or so read distance something like the ID12 would be a ton simple to implement.

6

paulvha:

  1. I have not seen source code that is ready to program a Pico. Not in the C##/C SDK nor Pico Python. I have seen it for Python , but is a layer on top of a larger Mercury API running on Linux or Windows. I expect it will take a lot of time for coding and testing.

Thank you for all of the help, I have one final question.

In regards to your first point, I found this Arduino core online for the Pico https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico in order to program the Pico in Arduino. Would this be sufficient if installed on the Pico?

7

The library looks complete and supports many boards. I have downloaded and compiled a couple of examples of the Sparkfun M6E library, they compile fast and complete without errors (only 2 minor warnings). Can not test it as I do not have a PICO / RP2040.