I’ve recently purchased the NFC Tag (FIT0314) and can’t seem to get them working.
I’m an absolute newbie to this type of stuff. I just fancied playing around with them as a bit of a gadget / learning experience.
I’ve followed what seems to be the most normal steps, i.e.
Download NXP TagWriter
Try to create a new link
Hold the tag against the phone to write to it
Whenever I hold the tag against t5he phone, nothing happens. It’s as if it’s dead. I can use the phone to pay for things so it’s not a phone issue I don’t think. I bought 4 tags and it’s the same for all of them.
I’m hoping it’s just me being ridiculous and there’s an easy solve.
To use the iOS 14 NFC tag reader, you’ll first need to add it to your Control Centre, which is the menu that opens when you swipe up on iPhone models with a Home button or swipe from the top corner on iPhone X and 11.
To do this, simply head into Settings > Control Centre > Customise Controls.
Once in the Customise Controls section, scroll down until you find the NFC Tag Reader and press the ‘+’ symbol to add it to the Control Centre menu.
Once you’ve done this, you simply need to tap on the NFC tag reader icon and hold your phone near an NFC tag to read its contents.
I played around with RFID some time ago. Bought two kits like the one below for about $5 (including postage) from overseas. The reader and tags worked well with an Arduino UNO and NANO.
Unfortunately the tags did not work with my phone (Galaxy S5 at the time). The NFC chip set in the phone was not compatible with the chips used on the tag. NXP MIFARE is propriety and NXP do not license the chips. Probably Samsung used a chip set that was compatible with their devices maybe not with other devices.
These kits are real cheap because they were designed with less than ideal security. I would use these as a play device not for anything important, like house front door, etc. Modern systems use much better security. (such as hotels and building entry systems)
No idea if the reason your tags are not working with the phone is related to the chips used, just relating my experience which may assist you.
Cheers
Jim
EDIT: Checked the tags and cards I have with current phone Nokia 7.2 and NFC Tools Android APP, works. Might look into this RFID again, had not checked it for a long time. If you know someone with a different phone or Android phone might prove whether the tags are faulty or not. All the best.
Further to previous post after some investigation today.
The Core electronic tags are listed as Mifare-One, the ones I purchased were listed as Mifare-Classic. No idea if these are the same, but from the NXP data sheets they look the same.
Apps: NFC Tools can identify all the RFID cards and 2 x tags I have. However, you have to pay for the Pro version to do anything else. The cheap Mifare-Classic tags, listed above, cannot be read by the Pro version. The other cards can be read.
MIFARE Classic Tool can read the tags but not the other cards.
NXP TagWriter (listed by Core Electronics) keeps crashing on my phone and cannot read the tags, one of the cards it can read, but says the card is blank, it is not.
I suggest trying a different App, maybe the Classic Tool.
After some more playing around, these tags do work with the Apple Shortcuts menu, i.e. I can go to Shortcuts > Automation > Create Personal Automation and the tag works perfectly for that. The difficulty is, this just lets me launch an Apple automation by tapping on the tag.
I’ve tried various other NFC apps and none of them get any response from the tags at all, so I guess Apple have locked this down?
What I’m trying to do, is write my contact details (name, phone, email, website) to a card so that when I tap on someone else’s phone it will bring all that up as a contact they can save. Essentially an e-business card.
If anyone has any other thoughts on how I can do this I’m all ears
I think Robin hit the nail on the head in terms of troubleshooting and I can support Mitchell’s link to IFTTT, I have a couple of scripts(/programs??) running to automatically save songs on Spotify.
Your project sounds amazing Alan, I’m keen to see where you take it!
I have just done a little bit of digging around with our product catalogue and have tested a few different tags. Just some nomenclature, there are two different types of NFC tags we sell, some are called MiFare Classic and the others are MiFare Ultralight. For whatever reason, it seems either iPhones don’t have the capability or have been locked down and cannot read the MiFare Classic, leaving the only readable tag via iPhone to be the MiFare Ultralight. We will be updating our product pages to include compatibility but as of the here are the tags we sell which are compatible:
