Contactless near-field/inductive serial?

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
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Apologies if this is already covered somewhere. I had bookmarked several articles on this topic and neglected to back up my bookmarks when I transitioned to a new laptop :frowning:

I am looking for information on low-throughput near-field wireless communication for games and simple consumer devices. If you've seen the Scrabble Flash cubes, you're on the right track. The articles that I've turned up today via the almighty Google are either extremely expensive to implement, massively over-complicated, or both. I'm looking for cheap and easy to implement, if I can send a couple of bytes a second with simple error correction I'll be happy. I don't need military grade encryption, error correction, or massive throughput.

Basic requirements? Maximum range 5mm, low power, and as small as possible. Referencing the Scrabble Flash example I mentioned earlier, I would like to be able to independently control communication to all 4 horizontally-facing sides of a cube (all 6 would be icing on the cake).

As I mentioned earlier, I had links to articles that fit the bill nicely from about a year ago but haven't had much luck digging them back up. Any references would be helpful!

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Anyone? Beuller?

This can't be that unusual a request. Has anyone messed around with this? Is it possible to form a basic serial link between two arduinos using an inductor or simple coil?

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http://my.fit.edu/~swood/inductiveData.PDF

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Thanks Lefty, that's one I already had. Do you know if I could use any off-the-shelf inductive components rather than the rigged coil that the author uses in his example?

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I would like to be able to independently control communication to all 4 horizontally-facing sides of a cube (all 6 would be icing on the cake).

I thought there are only two horizontally-facing planes.
Have you check on RFID tags, they use it in anti-theft devices in shopping mall, it's small and cheap, nobody bother to take it back...