RFID Card Reader - USB

Inexeon

Hi,

Is there a solution for the RFID Card Reader (USB) to have keyboard emulation? A small program on the background of windows that converse the rfid signal to simple (plain) text?
Or maybe with some hardware customizing?

Genetix

Look at page 4 of the documentation.
https://www.parallax.com/sites/default/files/downloads/28140-28340-RFID-Reader-Documentation-v2.3.pdf
When the RFID Card Reader is active and a valid RFID transponder tag is placed within range of the activated reader,
the tag's unique ID will be transmitted as a 12-byte printable ASCII string serially to the host in the following format:
The start byte and stop byte are used to easily identify that a correvt string has been received from the reader
(they correspond to line feed and carriage return characters, respectively).
The middle ten bytes are the actual tag's unique ID.
For example, for a tag with a valid ID of 0F0184F07A, the following bytes would be sent:
0x0A, 0x30, 0x46, 0x30, 0x31, 0x38, 0x34, 0x46, 0x30, 0x37, 0x41, 0x0D.

This might better help you understand what that means
0x0A = 10 ---> LF (Line Feed) [Start Byte]
0x30 = 48 ---> 0
0x46 = 70 ---> F
0x30 = 48 ---> 0
0x31 = 49 ---> 1
0x38 = 56 ---> 8
0x34 = 52 ---> 4
0x46 = 70 ---> F
0x30 = 48 ---> 0
0x37 = 55 ---> 7
0x41 = 65 ---> A
0x0D = 13 ---> CR (Carriage Return) [Stop Byte]

This might also help
http://www.savagecircuits.com/content.php?76-RFID-Reader-Software-for-Windows

Chris Savage

I understand your question as I have worked with other readers, including RFID, Magnetic Card and even Bar Code that are designed to connect to the PC and send the information as keystrokes. But what you need to do this is to get the serial stream into a USB device that the computer recognizes as an HID (Human Interface Device). Some microcontrollers like the Atmega line have optional USB which can do this. It may be possible to use a Vinculum chip to do this. Otherwise you would need to write a service on the PC that was designed to grab data from a USB VCP (Virtual COM Port, such as the FT232) and send it to the keyboard buffer.

As a note, some options would be better served with the serial version of the RFID Reader rather than the USB version, since that interface is designed specifically to be a COM Port on the PC.