I hope to start a project that will require me to encode 50 - 300 NFC cards for each person, and there may (in time) be 100+ users.
I have just looked at commercial encoders, and they average 6p extra per encoding, plus 24p per card, plus £10-£20 set up fee ... Each time. Or you can pay $10 a month for 100 cards, or around $100pm for a max of 1,000 cards. Expensive
I'd already researched building a reader, (rather than relying on a phone as the requirements were minimal) and found cards on AliExpress for NFC reader using I2C, a micro SD card on MOSI, realtime clock and ATMega board. (Total cost$10) So wondering if I can switch that around to be a writer.
Here's what I propose, so add comments if viable.
I have already written PERL code that will create a sheet of unique barcodes. I plan to stick these to the blank cards. The idea is to place the card on the reader, and scan the barcode with a handheld unit. The sketch will read the barcode (nothing more than a three letter code) and encode that into the card. That should make the process quite quick and easy
I know you can get libraries for the cards; would it be simple to integrate the scanner too? (In PERL, that comes in as if someone had typed something on the keyboard)
For the opposite side of the coin - rather than building the above unit -I'm now looking into a unit you can plug into USB of phone, and perhaps using TASKER to read it. (All I want to do once read is to record the three letters into a file, together with a time-date stamp)