Hi Kevin, yes it needs to be polling the input lines constantly to read the whole number. You could use interrupt-driven code like the code from this game: thebox.myzen.co.uk/Hardware/ … eople.html
This code basically works unchanged with the Seeedstudio reader except that it reads all 26 bits including the parity bits at the start and end of the code. You can strip them off with code like this to get the same number as printed on the tags:
unsigned long masked = reader3>>1 & 0xffffff; // strip parity bits