• Mon 2017.01.23

    Gordon,
    Thank you for responding promptly. As your T.Z. is six hours ahead of mine, my hope is to get something to you before your day is over. I'll handle your questions in the reverse of that asked.

    I checked as I wired the board, that I made sure I had a solid ground and that the RC522 was connected to the Vdd 3.3v bus. Just did a sanity check and my VOM indicates the Vdd rail is 3.2v and the 5v rail is 4.8v. I switched USB ports and found all three are 4.8v The Pico seems happy, so we'll live with that for now.

    Regarding the error codes. As soon as the board powers up and I send the tutorial code via the IDE, without a RFID key card, today I'm getting values of 2, 4, 80, 84 and an occasional 255. [ 0010, 0100, 1000, 1100, 11111111 could these be error flags perhaps? ] Is the error code in hex or is my assumption wrong and this is really decimal?

    There doesn't seem to be any pattern or sequence, just those values but at every interval as the tutorial code requests. Sometimes "Found card" with no value for the variable 'card' is displayed and the tutorial program immediately exits, leaving the right arrow prompt. This occurs even though there is no RFID card within range. Bizarre.

    If it is felt that, this maybe a normal communication state then my observation that the KeyeStudio silk screen for MISO and MOSI are swapped on the board I have and the pics at the supplier site for the Arduino wiring diagram are (and opposite) accurate. [4b]

    Thanks for the clarification on MISO-MISO and MOSI-MOSI. However, this seems counter intuitive as the MISO verbage 'Master In' imples that the from signal should be from a pin of 'Master Out' on the sending device, and therefore MISO-MOSI (incorrect). I'll continue to ponder this as I have accepted your clarification.

    What would you suggest as the next step?

    Is there a way to use RST or pull the MISO pins and using console.log() statements, get some onboard RC522 data to provide some clues?

    I took a peek at the module MFRC522.js [7] and possibly could start a new instance and build out slowly with new method names, and lots of console.log() statements in hopes of attempting to understand the logic, but I'm not sure where to start and what would be valid result data.

    Has anyone used and had success with the KeyeStudio mfg board? I was able to get that in two days combined with an existing order through Amazon. The MPN mfg board which seems to be readily available in Europe was a three week wait via eBay.

    Just wondering if this manufacturer has been proven yet.

    I appreciate your input Gordon, although you probably want to spend more time with the Puck. I'm a late starter here and only learned of the Pico just after the New Year and the Puck wasn't available yet. Will continue to plug away at this RC522 to get at an answer.

    Robin

    BTW this Pico is a sweet gem of an idea and I see this taking off over here in the States.

    For those following along a great wiki on the SPI bus and wiring MOSI and MISO
    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Per­ipheral_Interface_Bus

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