1. Overview
2. Materials
3. Construction

 

You see, in my school, we have a school attendance card. It’s a highly flawed system where we are supposed to tap our card at readers when we attend a lecture. Of course, your attendance will be taken by just giving someone your card to tap for you.

I decided to get creative and thought that I could extract the radio frequency circuit from the card, and integrate it somewhere else like my mobile phone. It’d be so much cooler if I were tapping my phone instead of my wallet.

This project aims to do just that. By extracting the circuitry from the card, I will be available to implement it in anywhere.

[ FAILED PROJECT ]

 

1. Radio Frequency Card
2. Pen Knife

 

This is the card every student and teacher in my school has.

Well, what actually inspired me to tear it apart was that there already was a large deep crack through the back of the card.

And if you actually try to lift the flap up, you can see the circuitry inside.

With the crack there, it was pretty easy to begin. I used a pen knife to follow the crack, extending it along the edges of the card.

And after some time…

It wasn’t easy because the entire card was glued together very tightly, but I managed to reveal the interior.

And eventually even extracting the coil from paper.

However, this was where the problem started. It turns out that while I was trying to extract the coil, the extremely fragile coil wiring broke at one side. Now, the whole circuit consists of a single long wire looping around and around to form the coil. With just a disconnection anywhere along this wire, the circuit is not completed and hence no current can flow through.

This was what one of photos revealed.

I had no choice but to discard the project from there. The wire was extremely fine, so trying to connect the two broken ends back together again would be extremely difficult.

I went on to report my card as missing a few weeks later, and had to pay a high fee for a replacement card.