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Device Lab Checkout - RFID Style main image

Device Lab Checkout - RFID Style

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You may remember reading about our mobile device lab here at Etsy.  Ensuring the site works and looks proper on all devices has been a priority for all our teams. As the percentage of mobile device traffic to the site continues to increase (currently it’s more than 50% of our traffic), so does the number of devices we have in our lab. Since it is a device lab after-all, we thought it was only appropriate to trick it out with a device oriented check-out system. Something to make it easy for designers and developers to get their hands on the device they need quickly and painlessly, and a way to keep track of who had what device. Devices are now checked in and out with just two taps, or “bumps”, to an RFID reader. And before things got too high tech, we hide all the components into a custom made woodland stump created by an amazing local Etsy seller Trish Czech.

Etsy RFID Check in/out system

"Bump the Stump" to check in and out devices from our Lab

If you’re able to make it out to Velocity Santa Clara 2014, you’ll find a full presentation on how to build a device lab. However, I’m going to focus on just the RFID aspect of our system and some of the issues we faced.

RFID - What’s the frequency

The first step in converting from our old paper checkout system to an RFID based one, was deciding on the correct type of RFID to use. RFID tags can come in a number of different and incompatible frequencies. In most corporate environments, if you are using RFID tags already, they will probably either be high frequency (13.54 mHz) or low frequency (125 kHz) tags. While we had a working prototype with high frequency NFC based RFID tags, we switched to low frequency since all admin already carry a low frequency RFID badge around with them. However, our badges are not compatible with a number of off the shelf RFID readers. Our solution was to basically take one of the readers off a door and wire it up to our new system. You will find that most low frequency RFID readers transmit card data using the Wiegand protocol over their wires. This protocol uses two wires, commonly labeled “DATA0” and “DATA1” to transmit the card data. The number of bits each card will transmit can vary depending on your RFID system, but lets say you had a 11 bit card number which was “00100001000”. If you monitored the Data0 line, you would see that it drops from a high signal to a low signal for 40 microseconds, for each “0” bit in the card number. The same thing happens on the Data1 line for each “1” bit.  Thus if you monitor both lines at the same time, you can read the card number.

Logic Analyzer of Wiegand data

Wiegand data on the wire

We knew we wanted a system that would be low powered and compact. Thus we wired up our RFID reader to the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi was ideal for this given its small form factor, low power usage, GPIO pins, network connectivity and USB ports (we later ported this to a BeagleBone Black to take advantage of its on-board flash storage).  Besides having GPIO pins to read the Data1 and Data0 lines, the Raspberry Pi also has pins for supplying 3.3 volts and 5 volts of power. Using this, we powered the RFID reader with the 5 volt line directly from the Raspberry Pi. However, the GPIO pins for the Raspberry Pi are 3.3 volt lines, thus the 5 volt Data1 and Data0 lines from the RFID reader could damage them over time. To fix this issue, we used a logic level converter to step down the voltage before connecting Data0 and Data1 to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins.

RFID, Line Converter, LCD, and Raspberry Pi wiring

RFID, Line Converter, LCD, and Raspberry Pi wiring

A Need for Speed

After that, it is fairly easy to write some python code to monitor for transitions on those pins using the RPi.GPIO module. This worked great for us in testing, however, we started to notice a number of incorrect RFID card numbers once we released it. The issue appeared to be that the python code would miss a bit of data from one of the lines or record the transition after a slight delay. Considering a bit is only 40 microseconds long and can happen every 2 milliseconds while a card number is being read, there’s not a lot of time to read a card. While some have reportedly used more hardware to get around this issue, we found that rewriting the GPIO monitoring code in C boosted our accuracy (using a logic analyzer, we confirmed the correct data was coming into the GPIO pins, so it was an issue somewhere after that). Gordon Henderson's WiringPi made this easy to implement. We also added some logical error checking in the code so we could better inform the user if we happened to detect a bad RFID tag read. This included getting the correct number of bits in a time window and ensuring the most significant bits matched our known values. With python we saw up to a 20% error rate in card reads, and while it's not perfect, getting a little closer to the hardware with C dropped this to less than 3% (of detectable errors).

Dealing with Anti-Metal

One other issue we ran into was RFID tags attached to devices with metallic cases. These cases can interfere with reading the RFID tags. There are a number of manufacturers which supply high frequency NFC based tag to deal with this, however, I’ve yet to find low frequency tags which have this support and are in a small form factor. Our solution is a little bit of a Frankenstein, but has worked well so far. We’ve been peeling off the shield from on-metal high frequency tag and then attaching them to the back of our standard low frequency tags. Strong fingernails, an utility knife, and a little two sided tape helps with this process.

Removing anti-metal backing from NFC tags

Removing anti-metal backing from NFC tags to attach to Low Frequency tags

Client Code

We’ve posted the client-side code for this project on github (https://github.com/etsy/rfid-checkout) along with a parts list and wiring diagram. This system checks devices in and out from our internal staff directory on the backend. Look to the README file ways to setup your system for handling these calls. We hope those of you looking to build a device lab, or perhaps an RFID system for checking out yarn, will find this helpful.