NFC-connected Phone as a User Interface - There's an App For That
We will start our first Day by introducing the project goal - write an application on an android phone that will allow us to control and communicate with our embedded device. We will also walk through the steps of installing the android development system on our development PC and writing the app to a phone.
Our second Day will be spent learning the basics of Near-Field Communication (NFC) and what the standard specifies for various classes of passive transponder tags. We will define the tag type we will use and what parameters we need to pass back and forth, as well as what security structure we need to implement in order to make our interface secure. We will also look at the NXP NTAG series of chips and the NTAG I2C Explorer Kit we will use to simulate our embedded application.
Now that we have our development environment set up from the first class, we will go through the steps of developing our basic android application. For our third Day, we will build the basic structure and user interface, and test it on the phone.
For our penultimate class, we will look at ways we can implement NFC capability to our app so we can communicate via the phone's NFC interface with a passive tag to sense, identify and read and write to the tag.
For our final class, we will use the NXP NTAG Explorer kit to read and write the tag's info that we access with our app to close the loop between the phone and our embedded device. We will look at the tradeoffs and areas for improvement for the future use of this user interface.
Charles J. Lord, PE is an embedded systems consultant and trainer with over 40 years' experience in system design and development in medical, military, and industrial applications. For the last twelve years, he has specialized in the integration of communication protocols into clients' products, including USB, Ethernet, and low-power wireless including ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, LoRa, and Thread. He has taught classes in these protocols for Freescale, Renesas, various universities and conferences including ESC and Arm TechCon. He has been a design partner with Freescale/NXP, Microchip, and Renesas. He also teaches webinars for various clients on IoT and embedded systems topics. He earned his BS in electrical engineering from N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C. and provides training and consulting services through his company, Blue Ridge Advanced Design, in Asheville, N.C. He is a licensed professional engineer in NC and a senior member of the IEEE. In his volunteer work at the IEEE, he has served at many levels from local to regional to board committees. He is currently the chair of the IEEE Western NC Section, NC Council and was general chair of IEEE SoutheastCon 1995 and 2017