Anybody in FEZ land work (or play) with NFC hardware yet? I know it’s gaining more steam in EU than in the US so far, but it looks like it may finally be catching on here. Most smartphones don’t yet have an NFC chip (or it is not enabled), so I’ve been looking into alternatives. Turns out several manufacturers have come up with an NFC microSD card as a stopgap for phones. Unfortunately, these manufacturers are ignoring requests from “little guys” like us, and asking for exorbitant licensing $$ and huge volume.
Looking for feedback from folks who have developed against the standard, used it, or have brainstormed cool applications of this tech.
@ Gus and crew - obviously, NFC capable FEZes is a must have (gadgeteer module, eBlock, shield, or whatever).
What do you think the folks at Kroger would think if I walked in and paid with a Gadgeteer with a bunch of dangling modules and wires? Any bets on how long before someone yelled for Homeland Security?
Architect, what exactly is your job? You have entirely too much time to do fun stuff!
@ ransomhall: Did you find some good and cheap NFC reader/writer? After quick search Im find one on sparkfun page: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10126
@ Dejan - Sparkfun’s does not have an antenna, which is more than half the battle with these things. To get maximum range you have to tune the antenna, which is beyond my skill level. I went with Adafruit’s board, which has the antenna right on the PCB.
[edit] Looks like there has not been any new releases in almost a year for libnfc, so I’m not sure what state the project is in currently. Hopefully, it’s good enough with not much left to implement from the NFC standard. This definitely needs a NETMF port. I’ll be busy for awhile on the XBee stuff, though.
If you define working as testing some RFID tags using the provided Arduino code on Adafruit’s site, then yes, it works. I have not ported that or the libnfc code to NETMF, however. NFC has not moved far enough up my project priority list yet. From a hardware perspective, it’s a great board, particularly because the antenna is very well tuned to get max range. You won’t find many low power RFID/NFC readers that will work at more than a couple of centimeters. This one goes out to 8-10cm. Please start a new thread if you have more questions.
Morbid…but cool.