Process

Two RFID scanners were required, one for receiving the umbrella, and one for scanning the fob. We started by wiring a servo motor and one of the RFID scanners. After doing some research about other projects which used the same RFID scanner on the photon, we found a library and wiring diagram to set up the scanner. The test code we ran printed the RFID serial number to the Serial port if a card was detected. From here we were able to modify the code so that an event was published whenever an RFID card was detected. We thought about checking the serial numbers as if we were checking for our specific devices, but decided to simply check for a valid card. From here, we looked into how to read two RFID scanners on the same photon. The RC522 scanners use a Serial Peripheral Interface bus to communicate, which uses a lot of pins on the photon. However, it makes hooking up a second scanner as simple as adding a different pin for the Slave Select Pin and sharing all the other pins with the first device.

The first version of our box can be seen below: