I just got a KBR1 in the mail today and am super happy with it, works perfectly. OSX was a little grumpy at first (it wanted me to press the shift key, lol,) but it got over it and now I can log in to my laptop with my xNT no problem. It scans very easily. The beep is a little annoying, anything I can do to mute it? I’d rather not cannibalize it, but I can.
I also found the app Barcode/NFC scanner keyboard on the android app store, it will scan an NFC tag and output the UID to text as if you typed it. I’m a little concerned about security, but I’ve found no alternative.
With these together I can enter my UID almost anywhere I want, I’m considering using it as part of my password for some logins. Honestly, however, I’d rather write passwords to the memory and have those read, so as to not give out my UID (haha, I have a UID!). Does anyone have a setup like this working? I’m confident I can write a keyboard app similar to the one I mentioned earlier that would do this; I suppose I could reverse engineer the KBR1 to read from memory as well.
I’ll update as I make progress on this front; please let me know if you’ve already made progress on this type of project, or if you have references on RFID best-practices so as to make this project something that could be sustained.
Open it up and put a piece of tape over the sounder. It will cut the volume significantly. I have to do this with almost everything I have that has a sounder like that.
If that’s still too loud, stuff the hole in the sounder with cotton then tape over it. lol.
I do this with all kids toys that make noise… it’s like the toy makers are all 89 years old and can’t hear their own toy designs… which is extra cruel because kids’ ears can hear you even thinking about getting up to go pee in the middle of the night… which makes them think it’s the perfect time to run out and demand a peanut butter and jam sandwich.
uhm, additionally with some needle nose pliers or tweezers you can break the top of buzzer and yank the diaphragm out (sorry Amal) , otherwise leaving the reader in 100% working condition. Took mine to work and rather not have any noise.
Thanks for the feedback on the noise, everyone. I muffled it a bit with some paper, and soon I will be getting some foam from my university that is used for noise cancelling. Maybe I’ll just pull the diaphragm out, but I’d rather not actually break it. Especially if there’s any chance that I could make a short that would damage it. (Odds are low, but crazier things have happened with me and circuitry.)
I’ve looked into writing a “keyboard” app for android that could generate passwords for new logins, write them to the my tag’s memory, and later read them back and output them like a keyboard in order to login. It seems doable; would anyone be interested if I made it work? If not I’ll hack something together for my own use, but if there is community interest I could try to make something user-friendly.
How would it connect to the computer? USB cable? Might be interesting if it were Bluetooth or TCP/UDP over the network or something… but then you’d have to also secure it somehow.
A couple months ago I made this: http://dangerousminds.io/2016/10/24/hello-world/
When the Arduino Leonardo reads the correct UID, it automatically sends text (such as password, passphrase or something else) as keyboard input to the computer.
Recently I added some lines to the sketch that when any other RFID/NFC tag is scanned, then it will spit out the UID number instead, just like the KBR1 does.