Storing ephemeral micropoetry on RFID cards for bite-sized readings

Most people don’t consume poetry in the same way that they do novels. Instead of reading a book of poetry from cover-to-cover over the course of a few sessions, the majority of people seem to prefer enjoying poetry in occasional little chunks. And unlike the epic poems of Greek antiquity, those tend to be short and sweet. Leaning into those tendencies, Roni Bandini built this RFID device to read micropoetry.

“Micropoetry,” in this context, is a style of short poem consisting of three lines. Each of those lines can contain up to 16 characters. That is roughly similar in overall length to a haiku, but doesn’t have any rules regarding syllables. In fact, some haikus couldn’t fit in this micropoem structure, as the lines would contain too many characters.

If these rules seem awfully specific, that’s because they aren’t arbitrary. Bandini created them so that the poems can fit within the limited storage of MIFARE Classic 1k RFID chips. MIFARE didn’t design those to store any significant amount of data, but rather for saving critical attributes like IDs. These rules ensure that MIFARE Classic 1k RFID tags can contain micropoems. Bandini even created a handy utility to write the poem’s lines into a card’s memory.

With that structure defined, Bandini built a device to let users read the stored poetry. When someone is in the mood for some poetry, they can simply place a micropoem RFID card on the device. An Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board will then scan the RFID chip using an MFRC522 module, read the stored data, and display the poem’s lines on a 1.3” 128×64 OLED screen. 

As an added dramatic bonus, one datum in the RFID chip’s memory is a counter. On each read, the device increments that counter. When it reaches three, the device deletes the poem from the chip’s memory forever. 

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