Donatien Garnier on Near field communication #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

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.

Check out the Adafruit NFC Board below:

PN532 NFC/RFID controller breakout board – v1.3

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.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.