Another open hardware mod experiment: RFID-tag/Reader board for the Freerunner, Nanonote (?) and Beagleboard

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Dear all,
besides the GTA04 and the Freerunner Navigation Board,
we have been working behind the scenes on a new hardware mod,
originally for the Openmoko Freerunner. It is a

	RFID Antenna, RFID Tag (M24LR64) and a RFID Reader (TRF7960) board.
	For 13 MHz (ISO14443, ISO15693).

The project is still in its beginnings, but the hardware is designed and
first samples have been built and appear to work (at least as far as we
could test them). And, a first U-Boot based driver running on a BeagleBoard
has shown that the RFID reader chip responds and sends interrupts. The
tag chip also works and has been tested with an external USB based reader
stick.

The boards have solder points so that it should be possible to interface
to different SoC and boards, e.g. BeagleBoard, Nanonote, OpenPandora...

The minimum wiring is that it nedds 3.3V power, 3 SPI wires and a INT line
to a GPIO. If power should be controlled or the SoC has 1.8V I/O, more
wires are needed.

For documentation and details I have uploaded some material to
this page:

	http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Freerunner_RFID_Board

Schematics and board layout are available in EAGLE format.

Now, what can you do with it? I don't know but would be happy to hear
about ideas...

We have the idea to sell these complete boards at 79 EUR (which
is approx. half the price of a TI eval board), if you are interested in
experimenting with this technology.


Nikolaus