I'm currently working on an interesting project for my pantry. I have literally dozens of glass milk bottles of different sizes which I use to store dry goods. And yet, sometimes it's confusing trying to differentiate semolina flour from something similar like ground cornmeal, for example. Plus, there are times when I wish I had the original instructions or nutritional information handy.
So I thought that I would design my own lids as replacements for the milk jugs and to embed RFID chips in each. That way, they would be waterproof, stand up to repeated washes and yet allow me to programmatically determine what's inside each container.
So, I'm thinking Raspberry Pi with NFC RFID reader and the average hoodoo to deliver the information.
The second version was a perfect fit with just a slight adjustment on the sizing. It took an hour in Autodesk Fusion 360.
That's essentially the bottles I'm using. There are numerous dairy providers here in California that are using them. I'm sure I have fifty or so of these, perhaps more.
He really gets excited about things. It's like if he was at the end of a Scooby Doo cartoon and they unzipped his costume a bunch of 12-year-old boys would fall out.
The RFID goodies came in and I was able to embed the tiny tag into a bottle cap and later, to read it. I spent the day playing with these things. The nfclib (C library) is what I was using today. Guess I'll chase the Python version next week.
I've been playing with RFID recently, and from what I've experienced, the Arduino seems to handle RDID better than the PI.
Unfortunately, the Arduino has no video output, so... it's connected to a Pi
This one is the 522 (cheapest thing they had), I wanna get a 532, but those are EXPENSIVE, and they use Ultralight-C at work, and they've got boxes of readers and the boss said I could have one cuz it might come in handy to be able to make our own cards.
Yes, I put a fan in it. And I made a little tunnel so the air blows directly over the heat sink
No, I don't know why.
Cuz I'm a geek I guess
The light and button are just for testing, and the thumb drive is being 8G of swap space so I can do "make" faster (it works)
It's also got rubber feet and 2 neodymium magnets so I can mount it on a metal shelf or something
I'm using the PN532 chipset in the Adafruit controller board. In one of their tutorials they suggested to power it via 5V on the Raspi:
"Use the 5V supply on the Pi Cobbler, and the 5V input on the FTDI header rather than the 3.3V supply, since the 3.3V supply is used by the core on the rasberry Pi and you don't want to pull sharp, heavy loads from it, like when you first enable and charge the near field."
I've managed to get this working in both UART and I2C modes so far.
With Python2, there's not a lot of wrappers that work (around libnfc). So I've been working with C and the libnfc on this and it's happy.
Actually, MIT made the original Scratch sort of interface for the Lego Mindstorms programming interface. Their brick is presumably an Arduino under-the-covers.
And I met with a representative from Sony who's also entered the STEM/STEAM learning space.
