Reading Input from an USB RFID Card Reader

4/20/2026 at 6:23:11 AM

I'm not sure to understand, what kind of reader is that? They speak of RFID but then it gets a barcode reader?

by ale42

4/19/2026 at 5:30:06 PM

I am very interested in an RFID reader that acts as a keyboard like the author describes, but for some reason they don't specify which reader the entire article is about.

Does anyone know, or know of one that acts similarly?

by ranger_danger

4/19/2026 at 6:24:30 PM

The Chameleon Ultra V2.0 open source project [1] can be configured to "Reader-to-HID" which should give you what you want. You can build your own, or buy one of many pre-built options [2]

[1] https://github.com/RfidResearchGroup/ChameleonUltra/wiki

[2] for example: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009580619682.html

by tux1968

4/20/2026 at 8:53:53 AM

The Chameleon Ultra is way overkill for a use-case like this, there are way cheaper readers that pretend to be HID devices all over the market

by DaSHacka

4/20/2026 at 2:03:35 PM

It's $20, and open source. Use-cases change, and it's very nice to have the flexibility and control to adapt.

by tux1968

4/19/2026 at 6:12:02 PM

That should be the most common behavior. Barcode readers work the same. In the past, you even plugged barcode scanners between keyboard and PC and they injected the key codes of the detected code into that.

by _Microft

4/20/2026 at 6:06:33 AM

The search phrase here is "keyboard wedge".

by crote

4/19/2026 at 6:13:41 PM

The ones I have tried in the past, at least under Windows, only seem to have support for the PC/SC Smartcard API, so you typically need a specialized application to use them, unless it's just for logging in to Windows itself, but I'm more interested in logistical/asset tracking purposes.

by ranger_danger

4/19/2026 at 10:03:25 PM

All the ones I’ve used have configuration options that dictate how it interacts with the host. I’d bet the ones you used were just configured that way instead of being configured as an HID

by tigereyeTO

4/20/2026 at 12:01:48 AM

This may be very helpful or very unhelpful, but a $4 RFID reader board and an Arduino clone will do this beautifully with a minimal amount of code and connections.

by stavros

4/20/2026 at 2:16:02 PM

Yes but my usecase requires a finished product I can simply link people to to buy.

by ranger_danger