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).

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.

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.

Overview Sometimes also called tag provisioning or tag writing, tag encoding refers to the process of configuring an NFC tag and writing data to it in order to prepare it for use. For advanced tags this can include configuring filesystems and setting authentication keys, but for most uses of NFC tags, this just consists of formatting the tag for NDEF data and writing an initial NDEF message set to it.

Introduction Here at TapTrack, one of the first decisions we have to make when starting any new project is what type of NFC tag we intend to use. With a lot of different tag technologies on the market many having wildly varying capabilities and capacities, this decision is not as simple as one would hope, and it often has a huge impact on what the resulting project will look like.

Using the TapTrack Tappy for easy NFC on Node By putting high-level NFC application logic on the reader itself, the TapTrack Tappy family of NFC Readers provides a simple way to add NFC to any project. Now with a Node Serial Port-compatible SDK, you can be off and running toward a neat NFC application in [...]

Introduction In many applications, it is desirable to protect NFC tags from unauthorized writing, and occasionally from unauthorized reading as well. For instance, if one was using NFC tags to provide a convenient way for customers to learn more about a product, it would be very bad if the tags were overwritten to instead send customers to a phishing site. Therefore, all of the common tag technologies have some sort of anti-tampering provisions.