Raspberry Pi 3B RFID RC522 - not reading data

Question

I know this topic has been already discussed in many aspects here and other forums but I haven't found help for my problem (which I guess may be just slightly different than in older topics because literally nothing worked).

My problem is RFID module not working (not reading any data) with RPi 3. I have Raspberry Pi 3B (40-pins board) and RFID RC-522 module. I soldered the module's pins and connected them as follows with my RPi:

Name    Pin #   Pin name
SDA     24      GPIO8
SCK     23      GPIO11
MOSI    19      GPIO10
MISO    21      GPIO9
IRQ     None    None
GND     Any     Any Ground
RST     22      GPIO25
3.3V    1       3V3

I am sure my RFID module works fine, checked it with Arduino. On RPi this module reads no data from any RFID tag. Every examplary program I tried to read data just starts and waits for data to print which never occures.

On my RPi I have tried to use different versions of Raspbian OS, currently running latest Jessie. Wheezy was not booting up on my RPi 3.

I enabled SPI. In my /dev there are visible spi's:

$ ls /dev/spi*
/dev/spidev0.0  /dev/spidev0.1

My lsmod lists spi_bcm2835 module.

I have installed and tried to use few different libraries for the module, according to different instructions I found, libraries I tried were (sorry I cannot insert more than two links, they all are on github): lthiery/SPI-Py, mxgxw/MFRC522-python, rasplay/MFRC522-python, ondryaso/pi-rc522. I checked these libs on clean installs of different Raspbian's.

Finally, I guess I have tried every solution mentioned in this topic: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/1547 and still couldn't make my RPi work with my module.

So if somebody solved this issue with latest versions of RPi and Raspbian please point me the direction how to solve this problem, how to get RC522 module working on RPi 3 and latest Raspbian Jessie (or other Linux OS)?

Answer 1

I have just connected a MFRC522 module to a Pi3B and it works fine.

I used the following connections

RC522 SDA   SCK  MOSI  MISO   RQ    GND   RST   3V3
       |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
Pi3B  CS    CLK  MOSI  MISO  N/C    GND   N/C   3V3
Pin   24    23    19    21          39           1
GPIO   8    11    10     9          GND         3V3

Test with a blank (default keys) card

Card request, ATQA=4
Card anticollision, UID=[105, 34, 214, 45]
Card select, SAK=8
authenticated sector trailer with key A
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 255, 7, 128, 0, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255]
authenticated data blocks with key B
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
exiting

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The code (RC522.py) and a test script (test-RC522.py) may be found here.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem. For some reason the SPI interface would not work on an RPi3. On a hunch I formatted anothed SD card with plain vanilla Debian 8 for Raspberry distro. It worked fine with the SPI interface and my RFID. What caused the problem in the otherwise ok and working SD card I do not know. I guess it was some flaky driver (perhaps a GPIO display I had tried).

Answer 3

Make sure that the tags you purchase for your RFID RC522 operate on the 13.56MHz frequency otherwise it will fail to read them.