Heidi Hinder discusses her craft + technology residency at Watershed in Bristol, UK on Humans Invent:
The project focused on creating new ways of exchanging payment via physical gestures in an attempt to make technology a more interactive experience. It also served to promote physical contact with other humans in an age when the digital is replacing the tangible.
Hinder explains, “I was interested in trying to bring people closer together through technology and how that might be possible given that people are often quite isolated and absorbed by it, so I used technology as a mediation to bring back human to human interaction.”
Using RFID tags and readers, Hinder created four different physical gestures that could act as payment including hugging. In this scenario the customer and server wear an RFID tag and reader respectively on their tops and money is exchanged when these come into contact – the easiest way for this to happen is by hugging.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
While we really suggest buying the NFC Breakout for use with libnfc (it was literally designed with this goal in mind!), Jerome Bernard posted up some details on getting the NFC shield working with libnfc on a Mac. Thanks Jerome for taking the time to share the details with other shield users. Have a look here!
Last month, I had the opportunity to fly halfway around the world to attend RSA Conference 2013. Everyone was given a lanyard and badge which contains your information entered during registration. When you visit booths, they can then scan your badge to collect your information and follow up by sending you spam.
The scanner varies across different booths, but mostly it’s an Android device that ran a custom software. Since it had a large NXP logo, let’s try to read it with the NFC TagInfo app. Looks like the tag identifies itself as a NDEF message but the data is gibberish.
Apparently these badges are called BCARDs and it turns out that you can download the scanner app from the Google Play store. The app requires activation by downloading some configuration data from their servers, and without doing that the app doesn’t seem to want to read my badge. Well, time to take it apart.
Often times an office finds the struggle of granting access to rooms without jeopardizing physical copies of keys. These struggles can be easily overcome with technologies such as facial recognition, finger print recognition, bar codes, radio frequency identification, and much more.
Here at I Heart Engineering, we felt the need to have awesome badges fit our daily attire, where we can have both style and access to our offices without the need of weighty keys by building a robot door.
The PN532 is the most popular NFC chip, and is what is embedded in pretty much every phone or device that does NFC. It can pretty much do it all, such as read and write to tags and cards, communicate with phones (say for payment processing), and ‘act’ like a NFC tag. If you want to do any sort of embedded NFC work, this is the chip you’ll want to use!
Great interactive gingerbread holiday project from John Boucard:
For Christmas, I wanted to create something interactive and fun to use. Let’s call it the “iGingerbread House”! I have been working on something that I call the “Storybox” for sometime now.
I always thought it would be cool to tell a story to a small machine and uniquely activate recorded content at specific times with specific craft items. These specific times could be at holidays or celebrations with craft based items that were fun to decorate and make.
I also thought it would be innovative to remotely activate content on an ipad app so that I could bring to life content that was associated with the machine.
I choose Google’s superior Santa Tracker, youtube content for 3 hours of holiday music, Magic Santa, and Apple’s Photostream as content for the ipad to activate based on how I physically interacted with the Gingerbread house.
Neat idea– change ringer settings on your phone by placing it in its case! Pearl Chen writes:
Have an Android phone with NFC capabilities? Make a multi-functional carrying case that automatically puts your ringer on silent, turns it up loud, or creates a Wi-Fi hotspot!
This NFC-enhanced slip case is constructed out of felt and sheet foam. Inside the case are 4 strategically placed NFC stickers stuck onto special metalized fabric that blocks the radio waves of NFC chips. This allows the case to have up to 4 sets of automated tasks assigned to it (versus 2).
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
The Chameleon Bag by Katie McElroy changes colors and patterns based on what’s inside it (or near it). It uses our NFC/RFID breakout and a DC Boarduino to control some 12mm RGB pixels. As the video above shows, the bag can scan your scarf to match your outfit or flash to confirm you remembered to stow your keys. Read more about creating this bag and see the Arduino code in Katie’s blog post.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
RF has always been fascinating to me — there’s something magical about sending and receiving bits and bytes over the air at high speed, through walls and concrete, out into space and back, etc. While RF has a reputation for being complex — and it can get messy depending on what you need to do — there are a number of platforms, products and tools out there that make RF more accessible for hobbyists than it’s probably ever been before. This quick holiday gift guide will hopefully highlight some of the tools you have at your disposal if you want to get started sending bits and bytes over the air yourself! (more…)
NEW PRODUCT – Stainless Steel RFID Blocking Passport Wallet. Keep your passport and all your travel documents safe when you are on-the-go. RFID blocking passport wallet keeps your passport and all your RFID enabled cards safe from identity theft.
Capacity: 1 passport sleeve, 5 card slots, 1 bill/misc. slot; Materials: Woven Stainless Steel Cloth, Black Leather; Dimensions: 3.75 x 5.5 x 0.313″
Stewart/Stand stainless steel wallets block unauthorized transmission from RFID enabled credit cards & IDs. Learn more here.
Made with 85%+ post consumer recycled stainless steel.
Normal wear and tear will cause the wallet to take on a natural patina over time.
Great post from Donatien Garnier discussing when to consider NFC solutions that features an Adafruit NFC board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation:
This is one of the situation where NFC can help. NFC is a very short range radio technology that allows touch-based interactions (to get an idea have a look at what Google is doing with Android Beam). We (a recently Cambridge-established startup called AppNearMe) developed a solution that allows you to touch your RaspberryPi with your Android phone to get the device’s configuration interface. You can configure every parameter using your phone’s large touchscreen and touch the Pi back to set the configuration.
The PN532 is the most popular NFC chip, and is what is embedded in pretty much every phone or device that does NFC. It can pretty much do it all, such as read and write to tags and cards, communicate with phones (say for payment processing), and ‘act’ like a NFC tag. If you want to do any sort of embedded NFC work, this is the chip you’ll want to use!
NFC (Near Field Communications) is a way for two devices very close to each other to communicate. Sort of like a very short range bluetooth that doesn’t require authentication. It is an extension of RFID, so anything you can do with RFID you can do with NFC. You can do more stuff with NFC as well, such as communicate bi-directionally with cell phones
Because it can read and write tags, you can always just use this for RFID-tag projects. We carry a few different tags that work great with this chip. It can also work with any other NFC/RFID Type 1 thru 4 tag (and of course all the other NXP MiFare type tags)
The PN532 is also very flexible, you can use 3.3V TTL UART at any baud rate, I2C or SPI to communicate with it. This chip is also strongly supported by libnfc, simply plug in an FTDI cable and use the FTDI serial port device to communicate – this lets you do NFC dev using any Linux/Mac/Windows computer!
Comes with: the PN532 breakout board including a tuned 13.56MHz stripline antenna, 0.1″ header, 2 jumpers/shunts and a 4050 level shifter chip. We also toss in a Mifare Classic 1K card! (You can get more tags from us here) New in version 1.3: onboard power LED, 3.3V regulator and an FTDI header so you can plug in an FTDI friend or FTDI cable and use with libnfc.
“Hope you are well – thought I’d share some news today as ThingMagic, recognizing that RFID plays a significant role in the Internet of Things and making Big Data actionable, is introducing the smallest, highest performing RFID reader module that meets the growing demands brought about by a more mobile workforce. In fact, the company depicted the Future of RFID in an Infographic.
“If a stock room employee can carry an RFID reader in his back pocket while going from store room to store room, he’s more productive and efficient. If a parking garage owner can mount an RFID reader on a pillar of an old structure, he is not required to make any structural changes. At only 46 mm long and 26 mm wide, the Mercury6e-Micro offers more flexibility for various uses and environments….”
Adafruit PN532 NFC/RFID Controller Shield for Arduino + Extras
NFC (Near Field Communications) is a way for two devices very close to each other to communicate. Sort of like a very short range bluetooth that doesn’t require authentication. It is an extension of RFID, so anything you can do with RFID you can do with NFC. You can do more stuff with NFC as well, such as communicate bi-directionally with cell phones
Because it can read and write tags, you can always just use this for RFID-tag projects. We carry a few different tags that work great with this chip. It can also work with any other NFC/RFID Type 1 thru 4 tag (and of course all the other NXP MiFare type tags)
The Adafruit shield was designed by RF engineers using the best test equipment to create a layout and antenna with 10cm (4 inch) range, the maximum range possible using the 13.56MHz technology. You can easily attach the shield behind a plastic plate with standoffs and still read cards through a (non-metal) barrier.
This shield is designed to use I2C or SPI communication protocols. I2C is the default, as it uses fewer pins: analog 4 and 5 are used for I2C (of course you can still connect other I2C devices to the bus). Digital #2 is used for “interrupt” notification. This means you don’t have to sit there and ‘poll’ the chip to ask if a target tag has been found, the pin will pull low when a card, phone, etc is within range. You can adjust which pin is used if you need to keep digital #2 for something else. It is also easy to change the shield over to SPI where you can use any 4 digital pins by shorting two solder jumpers on the top of the PCB. Compatible with any “classic” Arduino – NG, Diecimilla, Duemilanove, UNO – as well as Mega R3 or later. For using the I2C interface with Mega R2 or earlier, two wires must be soldered as the I2C pins are in a different location on earlier Megas.
This is an Arduino based iPod hackaudio project that allows you to select tracks for playback from an attached iPod Touch simply by placing cards on flat upper surface of the machine.
The cards can be placed in small plastic boxes with a picture of the album cover on one side to make small blocks more suitable for small hands to manipulate. Originally designed for disabled child. Since then people, teachers I know and so on, have been urging me to “do something with it” so this is an easier to set up and use quasi “tablet” version.
Membrane Matrix Keypad + extras – 3×4– Punch in your secret key into this numeric matrix keypad. This keypad has 12 buttons, arranged in a telephone-line 3×4 grid. It’s made of a thin, flexible membrane material with an adhesive backing (just remove the paper) so you can attach it to nearly anything. The keys are connected into a matrix, so you only need 7 microcontroller pins (3-columns and 4-rows) to scan through the pad.
We include a 7-pin extra-long header strip so you can plug this into a breadboard with ease.
Das Bot is a system for monitoring and controlling access to beer through RFID tags. Built on top of an internet-connected Arduino, the system accepts an RFID tag, checks to make sure you’re registered, opens the solenoid valves in the beer lines, lets you pour a beer and monitors how much you’ve poured, saves the data to a database, and prints out a receipt. Oh, and there’s prize badges you can win as well. There were three beers on tap this year (a homebrewed Dunkelweizen, a homebrewed Hefeweizen, and a Hofbrauhaus Oktoberfest) and each beer was tracked independently.
Some of the key new features between RiderScan I and RiderScan II is that I replaced the Adafruit Wave Shield with an Emic2 Text-To-Speech module – which is a Fantastic addition to the Adafruit product line, as now I can generate all the voice I need without have to pre-generate all the sound files and calling them one by one. I also added the new Adafruit MAX98306 Class D audio amplifier to the rig, which is another Great addition as i was using the ancient, Huge Vellum amplifiers in RiderScan I, and these are so small I was able to join them onto the main proto shield! This reduced the height of the rig by loosing the Wave shield (which is a big deal), and got further compactness and greater voice functionality – so RiderScan II should be a Much more capable system.
The PN532 is the most popular NFC chip, and is what is embedded in pretty much every phone or device that does NFC. It can pretty much do it all, such as read and write to tags and cards, communicate with phones (say for payment processing), and ‘act’ like a NFC tag. If you want to do any sort of embedded NFC work, this is the chip you’ll want to use!
NFC (Near Field Communications) is a way for two devices very close to each other to communicate. Sort of like a very short range bluetooth that doesn’t require authentication. It is an extension of RFID, so anything you can do with RFID you can do with NFC. You can do more stuff with NFC as well, such as communicate bi-directionally with cell phones
Because it can read and write tags, you can always just use this for RFID-tag projects. We carry a few different tags that work great with this chip. It can also work with any other NFC/RFID Type 1 thru 4 tag (and of course all the other NXP MiFare type tags)
Printable catalog (PDF)
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
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