A good number of the hacklets I'm working on at the moment are based on the Raspberry Pi, and getting to talk to stuff I want to combine with other interesting technologies.

The first of these is connecting Raspberry Pi to a Phidget RFID reader. It's a simple EM4102 (~125kHz) RFID reader that connects to a computer via USB. Unlike the Sparkfun device I was experimenting with last year, which reads and writes data on RFID tags, this one just reads the tag and sends the identification number.

Getting it working with the Raspberry Pi was very simple following the Phidgets Linux page; I don't think I needed to do anything differently to what it proposes on that page. I am however using the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro which may or may not make a difference.

One thing to note for the RPi is that the reader does seem to require more power than the RPi can provide over USB, so a powered hub is required.

So, without further ado, here is the video of it in action (I should note that the both the mac and RPi are connected to my local network via ethernet, but both could just as easily be Wifi).