For a project I'm currently working on I need to build something that can send sensor data to a phone. I thought of doing this with NFC. So when you present your phone to the NFC chip it can receive the data. That means that my NFC chip(PN532) needs to act like a tag. When searching around for a example like this, this didn't seem like a very regular behaviour for this chip and so I couldn't get it to work.
Since I was also not even able to read a regular tag with my chip it could also mean that my chip might be broken. But beside of that, is this way of doing it the way to go?
Is my chip able to do what I want? And are there any other options if not?
I hope this is enough information for you to help me out on this one. If not, let me know.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) might be the way to go. Setup your Arduino as a BLE beacon so you can connect to it using your phone and read the sensor data.
If you tell us what sensors/data your expecting to send then maybe we can suggest options.
We are building an app for a supermarket to read the weight of a scale. So for our test setup we made a little scale with a load cell. So this outputs the weight in grams.
What we want is that when you tap your phone to the scale it just reads the weight. So something like bluetooth might not be suitable for this.
Ooh and a little update on our setup: we sometimes get a result with our chip, but most of the times when we scan the chip with our phone it results in a error. Someone got a logical reason for this?
I don't think NFC carries data, it just establishes the connection, you still need a means to send the result. For Android phone, the most common way is plain vanilla Bluetooth - HC-05. A variety of standard bluetooth terminal apps may be used.
TheCoonJunior:
We are building an app for a supermarket to read the weight of a scale. So for our test setup we made a little scale with a load cell. So this outputs the weight in grams.
You mean you want this to work for the supermarket customers, who have the appropriate app installed on their phone?
Some phones have an NFC ability, I have really no idea how universal that is when it comes to protocol/connections. Bluetooth is common, BLE should be supported by most modern phones.
HC-05 won't work with iPhones, as iPhones can't work with the old BT2 protocol.
It is for a school project so if it works I'm happy.
Nevertheless I got my setup with my NFC chip (PN532) working. So I'm going to stick with that.
If someone ever come across this thread and might also have the problem that the chip isn't working. This was eventually what helped me solve my problem.