BangBits

A YouTube viewer found my old  demonstration of ER301 anti-collision and asked if I could make the source code available. So I cleaned it up a bit and wrote this small blog entry about it. When I started tinkering with the unified Danish transit card about a year ago, it was using a cheap Ehuoyan ER301 NFC/Mifare reader which I got from ebay. This was the first time I played with NFC stuff even if I would since move on to other and better devices. The cool thing about the ER301 however, apart from the price, is that it's relatively easy to interface with. This is because it's using a plain virtualized serial port with native ( cp2102 ) driver available in Linux and even Windows. No software came with the ER301 reader but there was a download link at the ebay site. The software was very basic, and all examples revolved around a driver DLL for which the source code sadly was not provided. With the documentation in hand and tracing the traffic going over the serial int...

Last year I went to the  2013 GOTO conference in Aarhus, Denmark. This year, I got the opportunity to visit the  2014 Øredev conference in Malmø, Sweden. The following is just a short reflection of my experiences and they may of course be entirely different than those of other attendees. The whole setup of Øredev is similar to GOTO and with 1300 attendees I believe they are about the same in size. Being in Sweden, albeit right across the water from Copenhagen, the crowd was predominantly Swedish with perhaps 20-30% of Danes. The speakers were slightly less known than those at GOTO, although a few speakers from Thoughtworks, Oracle and Microsoft stood out. The good Øredev feels quite a bit more intimate and cozy than GOTO did. It could be due to the constrained space and the lighting, but the pillow sacs, live jazz and plenty of popcorn, chips, candyfloss and beer sure didn't derail that perception. Wifi coverage was generally good and there were plenty of se...