NFC Chips And You!

Help & Information
#1

I love the NFC technology and have been somewhat active in the Web NFC development.

Has anyone played with NFC and Arduino/Arduboy? This post kinda got me thinking of ways I could combine this with another thing I am passionate about.

I am no where near ready to start modding and barely have any grasp on bread boarding. Would it be possible to use the usb port and connect it to a NFC reader? With some sort of hardware middleware and serial back and forth i’m sure.

Anyway, just feeling it out. Maybe a few of you might have some prior knowledge or at least a place to start.

#2

The Arduboy USB port can only be a client not a host. So you’d need something like a RPi or ESP32 or similar to do most of the heavy lifting.

Tried doing nfc also wireless charging on the back… after production. Doesn’t work through the metal back.

I did have the idea to actually make a black hat tool card reader nfc tool with a chip that’s got documented software for spoofing… same shape as arduboy…

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#3

Ah, well, that’s that then. How does it work that its a client and can’t be a host? Are you referring to the usb input for that?

#4

The USB port is controlled by a peripheral built into the ATmega32U4 microcontroller that the Arduboy uses. This USB controller only supports device mode, not host mode.

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#5

Interesting… was this just a design choice because of the form factor?

#6

No. The Arduboy, as the name implies, is based on an Arduino board. The Arduino board it’s based on is the Leonardo. The microcontroller chip used by the Leonardo is the Microchip Technology (formerly Atmel) ATmega32U4. The USB controller in the ATmega32U4 is limited to device mode only.

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#7

Today I learned!

#8

It is possible to provide USB host capability to a processor that does not support it in hardware, however this method requires the USB pins to be connected to GPIO pins in a method known as “bit banging”. So that vastly increases the number of chips one could use to do something like this, but is dramatically more difficult to code and far less efficient.

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#9

I wouldn’t put any bets on the ATmega32U4 being fast enough to bit bang even the slowest USB 1.1 low speed mode at 1.5 Mbit/s.

#11

You can get small host chips apparently?

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#12

But if @lyellick wanted to wire something, then an SPI NFC chip could be used directly, without need for a USB host.

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#13

Maybe he wants to wire something not inside of the Arduboy case and keep it sealed to keep the magic pixie dust inside.

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#14

The pixie dust will stay in place. I know how much it costs for bulk quantities.

No, after following the rabbit hole I feel NFC with Arduino would’t itch the spot I would hope for when
these combining two hobbies.

Thanks all!