RFID Reader/Writer Support

[tresf]

An ongoing effort which I wanted to document the success (failures?) of is RFID reading/writing through QZ Tray.

RFID is dominated in the US by a few major hardware manufacturers however the underlying technology is mostly Chinese made and very affordable.

Most hardware is offered in the following interfaces:

• USB
• Serial

Initial research into communication with the RFID readers was done using the Fongwah UHF reader.

• LF (Low Frequency RFID): access control and livestock tracking.
• HF (High-Frequency RFID): ticketing, payment, and data transfer applications.
• UHF (Ultra-High-Frequency RFID): garment management, variety of applications, ranging from retail inventory management, to pharmaceutical anti-counterfeiting, to wireless device configuration
  Infographic (impinj.com)

Code snippet (WIP): https://gist.github.com/tresf/6251ed49f7cc124c387dfe58548d8f22#file-fongwah-qz-js-L79

[tresf]

Slight update... we've acquired some hardware from Chafon which offers a COM port emulator, but unfortunately both models are stuck in keyboard emulation mode so this feature is at a stand-still.

[momoko-squid]

I am trying to integrate this featre into our POS. We are already successfully using qz for our thermal printers with great success. Now we need RFID/1D/2D scanners. We have a 3-in-1 unit, it works great with minicom and cutecom. You tap the card and the ID just appears in the terminal emulator. I running Ubuntu 20.04.02.

I followed the qz/serial reference code, but it doesn't work. qz detected the hardware though...but that's about it. No other response.

2021-04-30 01:51:51,330 [DEBUG] Message: {"call":"serial.openPort","promise":{},"params":{"port":"/dev/ttyUSB0","options":{"start":"\n","end":"\r","width":null,"baudRate":9600,"dataBits":8,"stopBits":1,"parity":"NONE","flowControl":"NONE"}},"timestamp":1619718711323,"uid":"wx2pdk","signAlgorithm":"SHA1","position":{"x":960,"y":553.5}}