Read from RFID sensor using UART

Question

I have a board for the RDM6300 which can read RFID tags. I could successfully test the board using an ESP32. Here is the micropython code:

from machine import UART, Pin
import time

uart = UART(1, 9600)
uart.init(9600, bits=8, parity=None, stop=1, rx=9, tx=10)

pin = Pin(26, Pin.OUT)
def flashLED():
    pin.value(1)
    time.sleep(.1)
    pin.value(0)


flashLED()

while True:
    b = uart.read()
    if not b == None:
        print(b)
        flashLED()

So whenever a tag is read I flash an LED. This works just fine. So now I want to attach the board to my RaspberryPi Zero.

I did enable the serial interface using sudo raspi-config. Also I disabled the terminal over that port. I did reboot after changing that.

After reboot I do see the following instances for the serial connection:

 $ ls /dev/ -lia | grep serial
 217 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root           5 Jul 25 12:11 serial0 -> ttyS0
 196 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root           7 Jul 25 12:11 serial1 -> ttyAMA0

I added pi to the group dialout:

sudo adduser pi dialout

When I do cat /dev/serial0 then the prompt is "captured" while cat /dev/serial1 exists immediately.

Now I found a script that reads from the UART like so:

import serial
from time import sleep

ser = serial.Serial("/dev/serial0", baudrate = 9600, parity=serial.PARITY_NONE, stopbits=serial.STOPBITS_ONE, bytesize=serial.EIGHTBITS, timeout=10)

while True:
    rx_data =ser.readline()
    print(rx_data)

I had to run the script using sudo since otherwise I would get the following error:

/dev/serial0: [Errno 16] Device or resource busy: '/dev/serial0'

Please note that I tried both /dev/serial0 and /dev/serial1 respectively.

The output of the RDMBoard is connected to RX of the Pi (namely Pin 15). I tried pin 14 too.

I don't get any data back when reading from my serial stream. As you can see I did try a few different things but it seems that I'm stuck. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Update: While I got it working now (see my answer below) I'm still curious on how to get this working using the serial interface.

Answer 1

I did manage to read the sensor using pigpio rather than the builtin serial interface:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pigpio python-pigpio python3-pigpio
sudo pigpiod # start the pigpio daemon

Now I can connect the sensor to a given GPIO pin (I used GPIO24) and read the data:

import sys
import time
import difflib
import pigpio

RX=24

try:
        pi = pigpio.pi()
        pi.set_mode(RX, pigpio.INPUT)
        pi.bb_serial_read_open(RX, 9600, 8)

        print("DATA - SOFTWARE SERIAL:")
        while 1:
                (count, data) = pi.bb_serial_read(RX)
                if count:
                        print(data)
                time.sleep(1)

except:
        pi.bb_serial_read_close(RX)
        pi.stop()

This results in the following output when holding a tag near the RFID reader:

bytearray(b'\x024300DB1AF171\x03')
bytearray(b'\x024300D4DE0E47\x03')
bytearray(b'\x024300D7D36423\x03')
bytearray(b'\x024300D4DE0E47\x03')

I had to connect the RDM device to 5V rather than 3V3 in order for it to work.