Saturday, December 27, 2014

How to connect an Arduino with an NFC shield?

One day, at a spur of the moment, I decided to buy an Arduino uno R3 and a dynamic NFC shield. I read a few websites that sang praises about the Arduino's capabilities and ease of use by hobbyists (who need not be electrical engineers) so I thought that it should be easy to connect, much like how you plug your monitor to your CPU or similar.

The packages arrived through mail and when I opened the box, I was clueless at how I should connect it. I read the "datasheet" and "schematics" documentation but could not understand how it could be called documentation -- it did not tell you step 1-2-3, do this, do that, etc.

The documentation is in the form of a link like that: Arduino Uno R3 schematic.

NFC shield schematic. The diagram shows that there are 2 LED lights. Those will light up when power is connected.

Editted on 16 Jan: It turned out that a Male-Female jumper wire (easily searchable from google) was require to connect the NFC shield with the Arduino. All 6 pins were connected and it functioned as a tag.

The NFC shield has 6 pins.
Pinout diagram that I referenced from blog.arduino.cc.

The same pinout diagram with the 6 pin holes highlighted.

Unfortunately, at this point, the example code I test-loaded on the board still did not work, so I am still figuring that out.

I wanted to write different URLs dynamically to a tag as an advertisement. At this rate of fumbling, I have no idea when that idea will see light.

[Updated on 5 Feb 15]: After writing on the supplier's facebook that the example code didn't work, and nobody replied to 4 of my emails sent over 2 months, a reply came within the day that the example code was wrong and I was provided with a working code.

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