I bought a few of the RFID readers MFRC522 from E-Bay and used it alongwith the library from Miguelbalboa.
All three readers read ONLY the blue key chain tags that ship with them. But when i try to read other MIFARE tags that i have nothing happens.( I have a old MFRC522 reader which reads these tags perfect - so problem does not seem to be with the tags )
I even tried to increase the Antenna power from 64 to 112 and yet nothing happened.
Actually in such cases you dont know how to proceed as the operation seems to be random or selective and there is little diagnostics that is possible...
I thought once a tag conforms to the MIFARE 13.6Mhz standard then all of them should behave same. No ??
Does your old read also read the blue key chain tags that came with the new ones? If not, the new readers might not be compatible with the MIFARE standard...
That risk is always there if you buy cheap stuff on ebay without any documentation.
pylon:
Does your old read also read the blue key chain tags that came with the new ones? If not, the new readers might not be compatible with the MIFARE standard...
That risk is always there if you buy cheap stuff on ebay without any documentation.
Yes my old reader reads both the keychain and the regular industrial tags. As you mentioned I think the problem is the new readers use a limited performance clone of the original NXP chip ...there is nothing that is printed on the SoC. As time passes you realize that E-Bay is a good starting point for makers but not for serious industrial solutions.
Just wanted to know if there is anything that can be done to tweak the readers by changing any setting values on the MFRC522 library ? ( The new readers do pass the init phase and report Software Version 2.0 )
That sounds like not a real NXP MFRC522 chip, so this can be anything and I doubt that a software change will activate the other protocols.
I thought once a tag conforms to the MIFARE 13.6Mhz standard then all of them should behave same. No ??
There is not one MIFARE standard but that's a bundle. The NXP chip supports MIFARE Mini, MIFARE 1K,
MIFARE 4K, MIFARE Ultralight, MIFARE DESFire EV1 and MIFARE Plus RF. Maybe your chip does only support one of them. As your supplier :-).
As time passes you realize that E-Bay is a good starting point for makers but not for serious industrial solutions.
Wrong, it's a good starting point for bargain hunters that don't care to throw the thing away if it doesn't work. Makers usually need at least a basic documentation but on ebay you usually get nothing. So in the end it's a good starting point for frustration and hassle. If you really know what you're doing and what exactly you need it's better to use AliExpress as there you have a higher chance to get in contact with the manufacturer which might provide some documents, even if they are in Chinese.
pylon:
Wrong, it's a good starting point for bargain hunters that don't care to throw the thing away if it doesn't work. Makers usually need at least a basic documentation but on ebay you usually get nothing. So in the end it's a good starting point for frustration and hassle. If you really know what you're doing and what exactly you need it's better to use AliExpress as there you have a higher chance to get in contact with the manufacturer which might provide some documents, even if they are in Chinese.
Well that's a learning... heard about AliExpress ( Jack Ma ??) . Willcheck out .