In this project we came up with a simple password manager device that allows you to associate an RFID tag to a particular series of characters. In principle we intend for that to be a password, but you may experiment with different combinations of words and phrases to your heart's content. Both sets of information - the tags' unique identifiers (UID) and the corresponding character strings - are stored in the code.
When the MFRC 522 RFID sensor reads the UID of a known tag (previously inserted in the.ino program) it tells the Arduino Leonardo to emulate the computer's keyboard and write down the associated password.
We wanted to make a beginner project that was in principle useful but didn't rely on a complex association of sometimes unreliable hardware to operate. Building something that involves moving parts and actually works as intended (as opposed to being a simple proof of concept) is a tall order and generally involves a bigger time investiment, hardware aquisition and custom parts procurement.
That said, we consider that a disclaimer is in order: this project outlines how to build a device to be played with, and to build off of, and certainly not a secure repository to adequately hold multiple pieces of sensitive information. Do not actually store your passwords in this manager if you intend to avoid data breaches.
The setup of the electronics is rather simple: the schematics we produced were based on the documentation for the MFRC522 library by Miguel Balboa (https://github.com/miguelbalboa/rfid), whose example readNUID program also inspired our code.
The use of a protoboard, though it is included in the materials section, is optional: it's also possible to directly connect the RFID sensor to the Leonardo board with no loss of function. We simply consider that the protoboard allows the design to more modular, in case the user wishes to add some functionality missing from our implementation, like a microSD interface module to store a higher number of tag/string pairs or log all the readings done.
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