How To Make Your Own iPhone RFID Reader

andylim writes "It's been rumoured for some time now that Apple will include RFID technology in a future iPhone. An RFID-packing iPhone could interact with various objects including opening doors and it could even be used in shops to register items at the checkout. Beating Apple to the RFID punch, last year a company called Wireless Dynamics announced an iPhone RFID accessory called the iCarte, but if you'd rather make your own reader then you'll be interested to know how a research assistant at University College London has managed to build his own RFID iPhone accessory."

Vaporware

[manyxcxi]

The iCarte reeks of vaporware. Show me a video of it in action, show me a datasheet not riddled with buzzwords. Hell, show a tentative price or release date. How would you program it? How would you take the pay and go info off of a debit/credit card? Also, if it is so easy to take that info off of a card, how worried should consumers be about their security?

Wait...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

You're telling me that a small general purpose computer(albeit a deliberately locked down one) with a serial port can be connected to a variety of serial peripherals, including RFID readers? Somebody fetch the smelling salts, I feel faint.

Sarcasm aside, of course, this seems like one of those situations where the hardware is utterly uninteresting; but the applications, once the boring hardware is broadly available could well be quite interesting, and possibly in unexpected ways(though, with RFID, not necessarily the good kind of unexpected).