White Papers
HOW TO USE NFC IN A TABLET WITHOUT A BUILT-IN READER
Sept 15, 2018 The all-in-one nature and large touch screens offered by tablets at very reasonable price points make them a very appealing option for many of uses - displaying product information microsites, powering brand activation points, and simply being the brains behind kiosks of all varieties. Unfortunately, while these tablets offer many connectivity options and plenty of sensors, one thing they often forgo is NFC capability. Further, even if the tablet does have NFC, using it often requires the tag to be tapped on the back of the tablet, which is highly impractical in most NFC applications.
NEW TAPPY COMMANDS: NTAG21X PASSWORD PROTECTION
Previously, we’ve talked about the the password protection feature found on NXP’s NTAG21X family of NFC cards. While our Tappy NFC readers have supported this feature for years, previously it was only available as part of a custom solution; however, there is a new public command family exposing this functionality that is now supported on Tappies with firmware version 0.76 or newer, which corresponds to ship dates of September 2018 or later for Tappies ordered directly from TapTrack (other distributors may have slightly older stock).
USING AN NFC READER AS KEYBOARD ENTRY DEVICE
Sept 24, 2018 Using an NFC Reader as Keyboard Entry Device Over the past couple of years, we’ve helped customers achieve keystroke entry from an NFC tag. Barcode scanners have for years come with this as a standard feature yet NFC readers for the most part don’t come with this capability in a built in or plug and play fashion. In this article we’re going to discuss this topic and the various solutions to this problem.
PRACTICAL NFC RANGE LIMITATIONS
Here at TapTrack, we regularly field inquiries about near-field communication applications that demand relatively long-range communication, such as indoor position tracking or anti-theft gates. Unfortunately, NFC usually is not a practical option for such uses due to its quite limited range. NFC Range Theoretically, for the 13.56MHz frequency used by NFC, the ‘near field’ ends at 3.5 metres from the antenna, but real-world range is a quite different topic. Since NFC tags draw their power from the reader’s field, the effective range is heavily influenced by the power of the field the reader is generating relative to the power the tag requires, which may vary depending on what the tag is trying to do.
EVEN EASIER NFC ON NODE WITH THE TAPPYWRAPPER
Dec 8, 2016 Previously, we showed how you can easily start developing NFC applications on NodeJS with a Tappy device using the TappyTcmpJs library. While that project was very short, much of the code we had to write was boilerplate for composing commands and making sense of the Tappy’s responses. This is necessary in order to take advantage of the full power of the Tappy family of NFC readers with all of their advanced commands and any custom commands we may develop for your use, but in a lot of applications, you only really need to detect tag UIDs as well as read and write NDEF messages.
ANTI-METAL TAGS
If you’ve ever tried to attach an NFC sticker to the back of your iPhone or perhaps put a Bluetooth pairing tag on a metal peripheral, you’ve probably noticed that the tag will no longer scan. Even if the tag isn’t directly on metal, just being close to metal is sometimes enough to cause your scan performance to take a dramatic turn for the worst. In this whitepaper, we will look at why this happens and how you can make your tags work again.