Disney has made RFID cool with their MagicBands. You can unlock your hotel door, buy a meal and even get into the park just using your band. It was honestly a lot of fun to use… so much fun that I wanted to keep using them when I got home. Luckily, you get to get the bands!
All that I had to do was create a complete MagicBand enabled infrastructure at my house. That seemed tough, so I decided to start small and make some LEDs blink.
Luckily, someone had already done the tough work of taking apart the band and digging up the FCC papers. The band has 2 radios, and one of the is standard RFID! This makes things quite a bit easier.
Knowing this, I hacked together a MagicBand reader using a Raspberry Pi 2, a Unicorn Hat, and a USB RFID/NFC reader. The RFID reader doesn’t come with software for Linux, but the LibNFC project has everything you need to do some fun stuff and it fully supports the SCL3711.
It actually didn’t take too much programming to put something fun together. I just hacked together the example program from LibNFC and the demo C program for the Unicorn Hat. I hardcoded in the ID number for my bracelets and play different LED animations when one is read on the RFID reader.
For extra fun, I put the Pi in a shoe box, cut out a window and lined it with velum to make a little viewer. Not sure what it is supposed to be exactly, but it is a lot of fun.
With all of this connected together, it is easy to see how it could be extended into something useful. You could create a smart lock, or fire off some internet task when a card or band is touched. It turns out that Washington DC’s SmartTrip card uses standard RFID and you could probably do something pretty fun since almost everyone in DC carries one around.
I put the code up here: https://github.com/robotastic/smartband
Comments
7 responses to “MagicBands + RPi + LEDs = Fun”
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Thanks so much for your post. When I try to make, I get the error: png.h: No such file or directory
apt-get install libpng12_dev
seemed to help
Are you able to rewrite all the programming without opening it up wirelessly? Or do you have to open it to rewrite the chip fully?
Thank you for posting this. I created something similar to control Hue lights. When you use a Magic Band, the room changes to the color of the Magic Band. Thank you for the inspiration!
Would this work with an Intel Galileo board?