How I Made My Own RFID tag - From Shenzhen, China to New York City

I'm here in New York City and my goal for this weekend is to try to build my own RFID tag. If you watched the video I

made

on how to find the cashierless store in China, you'll know that I took apart an RFID. Tags see how it worked and one thing led to another and my friend Stewart challenged me to make my own RFID antenna. I mean, you said it was going to be easy, right? And as all good challenges go, this one is about to go too far. I'm here in New York for the Hope conference, which stands for hackers on planet Earth, it's one of my favorite conferences and I thought this RFID project would be perfect to take with me and see if I can do a nerd night with someone else. smart hackers and help me, it's actually two parts treasure hunting and one part hacking and debugging, and well, I've been cheating a little bit, okay, I've been cheating a lot first, we needed to get back to the treasure hunt, this all started.

About two weeks ago, when I was still in Shenzhen, China, one of the problems I still didn't know how to solve was how I was going to get these little chips that power the label and, well, chance came to me because I got an email from Gale . the marketing director of impinge, which is the company that makes RFID tags, let me read that email to you. Hi Scotty, It was fun to see my inbox and test text messages lit up with so many people from different parts of my life watching your video about a store cashier in China, starting with my 16 year old son, who is A big fan of yours, John, the guy who designed the antenna you saw, is eager to tell you how complicated that job really is, our freelance product manager max. wants to send you a developer kit and mark our months a product manager offered to show you how to build an antenna out of a clip yesterday you

made

a bunch of Seattle nerd lights happy, but we started exchanging emails and I started to worry what might happen Maybe they didn't really understand the links I was willing to resort to to make something like this work, so I had some work to do.

I found some packaged impact RFID chips on Taobao. I also learned from him pins that use what is called AC Pianist tropic. conductive paste to attach the chips to the aluminum antennas and then they said: you know you'll need a fairly large expensive industrial machine to do this, it's probably not something you can take to a conference after a bit of online research I found out it's on It's actually also used to repair LCD screens, so I did what I always do when I have a strange unspecified question about cell phones and repair supplies and went to Schwann's Brothers Tools.

Turns out they use ACF instead of film instead of paste. We headed over to try to look for it as CF, but it has to be in the refrigerator, it has to be clean, so it's not here in the market because there are no refrigerators in the markets, so he took me to his office in one. of the office towers and they had ACF that I could buy and they also gave me a demonstration of how their machines work, oh there we go, yeah okay, now the boss who designs these machines said the same thing that the Impinge guys said, what was that.

I needed a lot of heat and a lot of pressure to get this to work properly, but the question is if I wanted to do it incorrectly, could I make it work? So I described all this to Stuart over dinner and well, one thing led to another and we ended up at my apartment like midnight, so I've collected a lot of crazy stuff. I have a crazy soldering iron contraption with aluminum foil chips in various very thin thicknesses and let's try it, yeah, I thought. I would just trace it, cut it out, let's take the chip, voila, here are the chips that I got, which are in a plastic package to solder them to the circuit boards, but that's not at all what we're going to do because we have aluminum and we don't you can solder to aluminum it just doesn't stick yeah it's super stylish so this is a special bro tool it's a regular soldering iron with the big tip removed and these crazy t bar gadgets if there's a silicone pad In the end we can supposedly use this to set the ACF if we stick to the aluminum foil first.

I would be tempted to just put two pieces of aluminum foil on it to make it look like a fool. The Yogi's have some weeds, but you know it's my silicone pad. Well, I didn't, that wasn't in the realm of possibilities of things I thought about. Yeah, that's pretty toasty, isn't it? Yeah, just a sliver of aluminum foil that we cut off, yeah, that's something. I declare victory in English, how will we do it? Give it a try if they will test it on the ice, however it has other things we could try to attach to, like some SMT components, I'm sure I have a ton of passes, yeah, are you something like that?

Well, right now we have a welder. with a modified tip too hot, I mean, I probably noticed, sorry, yeah, yeah, use the echo, yeah, even actually let's do it, we'll put this right there on the hakko, okay, give it a try, buddy, The most important thing I wanted to find out is is this CA approach viable? Yes, and I think I can definitely say yes. AC with a soldering iron. It's not a completely crazy IP to grease right now. I think the thing to do now is send an email to influence. as if he had discovered how to join chips in aluminum.

Can I have some, please? It's all about joining and I deal with that aluminum because that's not a crazy idea. I think we should hit that guy. I didn't, so I mean. I guess I don't really need bairdi chips to make it work, no actually I don't need anything more than sitting with an exact man whistling, thank you my mad inventor mother, that was great, I was sitting, impressed me so far. so at this point I'm pretty sure this is definitely possible. I sent some photos of the Franken tag that Stuart and I put together to our friends at impinge and they got really excited and said, "Okay, not only are we going to send you a dev kit, a reader, and some sample tags, but we're also going to send you a bunch of bear dies and some stuff we scraped off a wafer and everything I really needed to get where I really wanted to go Now I'm on my way to the Pennsylvania Hotel to set up the microscope for the conference and see if I can convince some hackers.

They're smarter than me to help me build a working RFID tape. We're here at the Hope conference in New York and I'm here with Simon, who says he doesn't want to be on camera, so Simon has left. took hold of this and said, "Well, why don't I use a copper loop as an antenna? Yeah so I managed to tin the pads of that little encapsulated chip and I've connected a strand of copper wire into one pad right now I'm trying to bend it into a line so I can connect the other side and then I'd have a loop and maybe that's it enough to power the chip, I think it's on fine, it just comes off very easily, so Simon, you said you're ready to try, you finally soldered it on if you want to bring it here, so I've got the reader. working fine, you can read oh wait no no wait yeah that's an incomplete read that's awesome.

I wouldn't have imagined that would work. Simon, who doesn't want to be on camera, has successfully soldered an antenna that works as if it were made of copper. coil that is super cool, so the proof of concept is really incomplete. The antenna still works, yes it is a very incomplete antenna, yes that gives me hope that as far as antenna design goes the two ends need to be connected yes and I think some aliens now. I feel a little silly spending all this time looking for a CF and an aluminum and all these things, yeah, they could just have one cable, so just so I understand, here you're going to grab one of the iPhone 7 headphone adapter plates. that I made for the iPhone headphone adapter video and you're going to try to turn this into an hour-long horror electronic tag, why not solder an RFID chip on it?

That's super awesome and you're also the guy who as a teenager bought a mainframe and dug up his basement, yeah, to put it in his basement, my parents' basement, but that's our help with that, they weren't originally on board, but when it showed up at the house in a trailer, they were pretty. many had no choice but to accept it so this was the loop we had to make to get a loop in the antenna circuit but otherwise the chips were simply soldered on the back and this should be an RFID tag functional you are reading.

Great, tell us what's going on here, so we weren't curious to know what was going on with these RFID tags. In the development software, you can see that the tags respond at different frequencies and it's seemingly random, so we wanted to see which one is the transmitter. was doing what kind of frequency hopping was it doing so we pull out a software defined radio and we're looking at about 30 megahertz of bandwidth the colors indicate the strength of the signal and these really strong signals here are the transmitter yeah We stop the transmitter. Note that the spectrum becomes clearer.

Finally, after all this experimentation and good hacking fun, I'm going to sit here on the last day and try to make a working tag that looks something like this. I'm going to cut it. aluminum foil try to attach it to the ACF to see if we can get it to read. I'm just going to use one of these labels as a template to get the correct antenna shape pretty close, not bad, now I need to cut a small slit. here and bond get my chip now I need my ACF so it should be enough to just stick it in and then it will come off so now I think what worked before when I was playing with Stewart was to put the chip in first. upside down and then put the aluminum foil on top and you can make the pads wear better, so what is this AC thing anyway and what makes it so interesting?

Why not just use solder? Two reasons, the first is that we are making the antenna with aluminum and the solder just won't stick to the aluminum, so we have to use something else. The other reason and this is what makes a CF really special is that it only conducts electri

city

in one direction, it only conducts electri

city

vertically and not horizontally which is quite magical and I want to explain more about how it works because I didn't understand when I bought this for the first time how could that be, but I'm going to need some accessories, so hold on, so here's the deal, anise.

Tropical conductive paste has these tiny conductive particles. We'll use cheese balls as an example. Now the conductive particles are sandwiched between two conductors like this and squashed a little so that they are compressed and By pushing on the two outer surfaces, now a cheese ball conducts from the bottom surface to the top surface, but there are a bunch of cheese balls. cheese, so if we put too many cheese balls, they all touch each other and drive horizontally like that, but if we spread them like that, none of them touch each other, but they all touch the top and bottom surface like this.

Why is this important and the reason it's important is that it's used when you have a bunch of different drivers? saying to my fingers so you don't want to touch each other so you want this, let's say it's a pad like a ribbon cable on an LCD screen, right, you want all of these to be electrically separated, but you have another set that you want to stick to them and they are all next to each other, so how do you put paste or film without driving from one to the other and that's where ACP or ACF comes in so you end up with balls in each of them? the fingers and maybe a few in the middle, but since none of them touch this way you don't end up with any continuity between the fingers, not so cool now they use it to connect flex cables to the back of the screen glass LCD, also use it for RFID antennas when the chips are tiny and they are attaching bairdi chips to an antenna oh man I'm covered in cheese she's all about her now.

I should have bought napkins too, let's try to make it work. Holy host, you should make one. Yeah, I mean, if you can teach me that whoever is good, okay, then just hit with sovereign eyes, so the challenge is that you are very similar to what is out there, you will see when you put the chip in there, it will be too narrow , very well done, not like me. I guess it doesn't seem like much, but there have been like three days of people here at this table trying to make this happen. It's a good combination of electronics and arts and crafts, okay, so I think we can declare a complete success on this.

We've made a bunch of other labels this weekend, but there's one thing left to do: test them properly. It's been fun. New York City. I'm on my way to Seattle to go see how to put these RFID tags in the anechoic chamber. how everything we did, besides talking to the guy who actually designed these antennas, he is nice enough to take me to his offices to testit usually tends to be very small coming out of the foundry hence the kind of backend shots that enhance it so usually people grow tall copper pillars or gold pillars if you're in the automotive industry to single out this one is a really thick shape to If you have to start cutting this, it's going to take forever to get through it, so you're going to have to thin it out.

The reason foundry wafers come out this thick is that it's kind of the industry standard for handling with all the robotics out there. there I would say around 200 microns the silicon starts to become flexible and that's when it starts to need extra help like this, it's definitely below 200, that's why it's on a support and it's like a flexible tape, it's like a polyolefin , if all. that is thinned and diced will invariably go into a carrier of some form and then at that point it continues for simulation and the cingulate literally just cuts it into pieces, do you want to guess how long it takes?

Let me clarify. In the process there are multiple technologies the mechanical saw is the diamond mechanical saw blade is the most popular the saw blade is like a piece of essentially thin wire actually no, it is like a little bit it is like a disc, so it is like a piece rolls a wheel exactly, it's a pizza cutter, okay, yeah, exactly, so I guess a couple of hours per wafer, yeah, that's pretty close. I'm on it, yeah, like an hour, a wafer, can you give us an idea of ​​what it is? depth as final process design what are you guys doing that makes these chips so tolerant to a wide variety of antenna designs? does it work or do you want to take that block, yeah, so I'm not in the design space for it, it's Well, a lot of the complexity in the design is in the impedance value on the chip, how well it is able to respond.

Automatic adjustment capability we call auto. tune, yeah, where the chip can tune its front-end impedance automatically, okay, while powering up, a lot of things happen behind the scenes, they're designing the MV, designing the RF front-end, yeah, and then there's that controller piece, yeah , which is being translated. the signal that comes in to write and read information from the tag, okay, it's those three main logic parts of one of these chips, okay, yeah, so we describe a controller and in the MA memory, and it's effectively what you might think . It's like a memory that you can access from you know, ten meters away, which is totally crazy, yeah, completely, this is super cool and I thank you so much for sharing a whole new world.

It has been around for a long time. decades and it still amazes me, thank you, yes, absolutely, for you to know this brand. This whole journey for me started out as buying a can of beer, peeling the sticker off the label in this earless store, yes, China, and that's really the only use case. I've been thinking about: could you give us an idea of ​​what else people do with this stuff? Within our technology, in some industries there are challenges knowing where their products are currently located if you were just using the barcode that I need. You have to match vision, but with Rain RFID you no longer need line of sight on the order of meters of Reed's range, so if you're using a handheld scanner you can sweep one wall and get it and the other.

The example would be for luggage tracking. Okay, yeah, it looks like you have it that way. I know what this looks like. The airline wants to make sure I went to the right place. Awesome, so I guess you guys have other demos too. Okay, we have a product demo here, Gary, this is here, shipping verification. Okay, the use case, so what I need to do is use this box, so when we talk about sending verification, imagine this is. a pallet is okay and we have a shipment going on a truck okay so I have a little line on the floor so I'm standing on the right and you're inside the facility that's why I'm getting off the truck here like this that this is the way out and the idea is that I want to know two things.

I want to know what crossed the line and I want to know when it crossed the line. Yes, I'm reading right now. the box here nothing happens on the screen and I just want something to happen once we cross the line so as we cross here we should see the screen update to tell me that these elements have moved and that's outside of that . The challenge is that it seems really simple, but again I think you've already seen it. Yes, we can read about 1,000 square feet, so you get a lot of coverage. We're probably reading everything here, great, and then you have one more demo for us, yeah. right, maximum, you have the latest demo for us here, that's here, are you doing something cool with Raspberry Pi?

That's right, yes, this was built around one of our integrated reader modules, okay, so it's basically a Rain

rfid

reader integrated into a small package. Okay, and you can add it to a device to add red functionality to that device. Okay, so we have one of those Rs 1,000 reader modules on the circuit board that has a Raspberry Pi Hat form factor and what that means is that I can just plug it in. on a Raspberry Pi, yes, and then I have a reader, yes, I put it on the network, I plug it into power and I can read nearby tags and send the tag readings wherever I want, well, in this case we have two. of these things in different locations, yes, and they send tag readings to the cloud.

I have a bunch of household items that are individually labeled and then I can ask my smart speaker, which has an ability that goes through the cloud, you know? Where is my stuff? Okay Alexa, ask her where my wallet is. Oh, okay, so we're at the second location. I can take care of the first one. Well, this is the location of Ireland. Alexa. Ask her. Pinch where my wallet is. Well located near the island. Oh excellent. now I just need a bunch of raspberry eyes to put in my apartment that's right and raspberry pies are cheap yeah okay yeah this is amazing thank you cheers guys thank you so much for having me today and sharing all his wisdom and sending.

They gave me the parts, the code and the knowledge, and thank you for showing me, you helped me show Stuart that it is actually possible to build your own aphrodisiac. I thought I'd come here to beautiful Lake Union as the sun sets just to wrap things up I guess. The first thing I want to say is Stuart. I don't quite understand why you thought it would be so difficult to create your own RFID tag. I mean, it's particularly easy if you don't really care how well it reads, it really was more. a treasure hunt rather than a debugging of an engineering process, such as why other projects had been done.

I want to thank everyone who joined me on this adventure and helped me along the way, thanks to impinge for taking me here to Seattle and providing me with all kinds of equipment, chips and advice and giving me access to their laboratories and engineers. Everyone I spoke to who worked at impinge was simply amazing. Thank you very much to all. There is a link to their website in the description below if you would like more information, thanks for suing May for donating the microscope. If you want to learn more about that microscope with built-in screen, there is a link to its Aliexpress page in the description.

Also thanks to Stuart and Laurie and all of Hope Mitch and Patrick and Jeremy and Joey and who else am I. I forget about Robin and Simon and Connor and Glitch and Mitch and Lady Red and everyone else who came and hacked RFID tags with me and played with the microscope. and gave me advice and helped me film, it was probably one of the most fun things I've ever had at a conference, you all are amazing and lastly, thank you all for coming down this weird rabbit hole with me on this crazy adventure which started taking apart from a sticker on the side of a beer can and a strange ATM store in China that has taken me literally to the other side of the world if you enjoyed this video and want to join me on other strange technological adventures all over.

The world hit the subscribe button below. I'm Scotty from Stranger Parts and until next time stay tuned for more adventures. See you soon. I forgot one more thing: I wanted to thank Evan, who is a The Odd Bart fan who helped me film at the Impinj offices yesterday. Thanks Evan, you're amazing and thanks for connecting me with your mom who works at impinge, which is a big part of the reason I came here, so thank you. So I wanted to thank Su Mei, my microscope salesperson in Shenzhen, who was kind enough to donate this microscope to me to give me hope to be able to do all this amazing hacking we've been doing all weekend.

I made two promises. one was that I would tell you guys about this and if you wanted a microscope from her, she's super cool, she sells cool microscopes at reasonable prices. There's a link in the description below, but also the second promise was that the microscope would go somewhere. where he would be well liked and Jeremy and Joey are part of a hacker space in Texas and any good job can work half way through the job it works and you guys are open to the public yeah he wants to come anyone who wants to come we work on a sliding scale and we've had a lot of success bringing in people who would normally go into a hacker space and do all kinds of cool things that are impossible, so I'm really happy that this is going to a good cause.

Many people are going to love it. Thank you very much, yes, you're welcome. You are really updated, yes, yes, and thanks to sue your partner or go, thank you sir, thank you.