Alongside the persistent rumours of an Apple iPhone with an RFID/NFC reader (and our own experiments with iPhone NFC interactions) it seems that Google is really beginning to push for NFC as part of its Android operating system and hardware guidelines. In the recent “Conversation with Eric Schmidt” with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at [...]
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Sonmicro RFID Processing library
Last year we made a Processing library for the Sonmicro SM130 RFID read/write module together with Jørn Knutsen and Tom Igoe. The SM130 is a little module that lets you read and write to Mifare RFID tags. The Sonmicro Processing library is a good and flexible tool for exploring RFID interactions. One of the things [...]
Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments
On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that incorporates Near Field Communication technology. This phone is the fourth NFC-capable phone from Nokia in as many years and it is the first NFC device that supports 3G data connections. This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has [...]
Making things talk
Tom Igoe’s new book Making things talk arrived today, full of lovely projects and code examples. Tom’s previous book Physical computing has been the definitive reference for all hardware hacking that goes on at AHO and in the Touch project. Making things talk is structured into specific projects, and covers technology as part of practical [...]
Sparkfun now selling ID12 readers
We have been making a lot of prototypes with the Innovations ID12 RFID readers in the past few months. We’ve been getting them from the super-helpful Core RFID, and now Sparkfun is selling them. The ID12s measure just 25mm x 26mm and include their own antenna. They are great because they are packaged in a [...]
NFC at Wikipedia
I revisited the Near Field Communication at Wikipedia page this week. For a long time it was a copy and paste of the About NFC page from the NFC Forum, but now it has evolved into a page of its own: However it is still in a pretty sorry state, a mixture of history, standards, [...]
Alternative RFID infrastructures
This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. The landscape of RFID technology is focused on surveillance, efficiency and control. The near-future possibility of RFID implants, identity cards and passports is focused on the ability to efficiently and accurately identify people. The rush to replace barcodes with RFID [...]
RFID form factors
As our interaction design students get deeper into prototyping with RFID, we needed to start looking at the range of possibilities around the materials and forms of RFID tags. Last week we created a demonstration board of all the RFID tags that we have collected over the last year. Most of these tags are available [...]