hello everybody. ok, today we're going to take a little bit of alook at some technology that comes with the samsung galaxy s3 but most people won't really have lookedat in any great detail. it's called nfc.
Android nfc, near-field communication. you'll have heard about this on things like your visa card and mastercard that now havecontactless payments so you just pop your card on top of a reader and it bills whatmight be small purchases. well,
that same technology that can also be usedfor making payments via a phone, as soon as you pop your phone onto one of those readers, it can also be used to store yourown information and then so your phonecan scan the tag and do actions, whatever you happen to likeit to do so you could create an nfc tag which turns your wifi on and off. you could create an nfc tag which updatesa database on the web, say you've checked in somewhere you make an nfc that doesfour square checkins, sends a status update to facebook, whatever you wantin a kind of the world is your
oyster card as it were which funnily enough also uses nfc. for those of you in london or russia i thinkalso uses the same technology on their underground and new york? guys, tell me do you use contactless paymentsystems in new york subways? bit of nfc? so, anyway nfc comes with a few different sizes. youmight think of sizes as being the actual physical size of the
nfc chip itself but actually, it's all down to the amount you can store on them. some of the chips can store substantiallymore memory, more information on them than the other chips, so for instance,these ones hold about 46k, 42k i think on these. and on these ones you get about 56. there's also some other types as well.here's nfc built into a wristband really good for clubbing and things like that.
we'll start seeing these popping up quite oftenfor things like concerts i think. more than anything else. but yes, it all comes down to how much information you're going to be able to store onto each one to suit the project. in most cases, these ones, the round stickers, what's knownas bullseye nfc chips these tend to be the most flexible, around56k i think you can store onto them. and that allows you to store a reasonablesized url, sorry, 56k 56 bytes. christ! if you could store 56k you'd be laughing!no, 56 bytes of information.
you're talking about 56 characters essentially, so you've got to be careful what you store on them and how much data you're putting on them but one of the easiest things to do is to use an app so there are already some apps available which allow you to create the nfc commands as it were on your phone. this particular one, nfc task launcher
has an option which allows you to compressthe nfc command that you're putting on to the chipto save space but it can only be read back by your phone, basically it's a compression. what we're going to do is we're going to build a tag to turn wifi on and off. create a new switch, assign the task. new task. wifi, you can see in here i can turn bluetoothon and off, select a particular hotspot
switch to bluetooth discovery, airplane mode,gps, there's loads of options in here, there's wifion and off. and it's a toggle, ok. so what will happen is we're going toload this onto one of these bullseyes, wait for a second while i do this, won't work, just use this piece of card. there you can see is the nfc, we're now going to place it underneaththe phone, you can hear the pip and it says the tag is written successfully.now if i just come back to my home
and i'm just going to zoom in there soyou can just see what's going to happen up at the top. keep your eyes on the taskbar at the top. toggle wifi. you can see there it's flicking the wifion and off. so, for instance, what i have is an nfc chipsat downstairs at my door and as i go out i scan my phone against the chipand it turns my wifi off on my phone, saves my battery. likewiseif i wanted to i could string a few commands together and i could set it soit turned my wifi off, dimmed my screen
brightness boosted my brightness, turn bluetooth on for my headset, whatever you feel like. nfc is really, really flexible.it's going to bea massive boon for businesses especially. you know, if you've got one of these particularones like an nfc symbol chip, printed one, what you can do is set this up in your store, put a little marker underneath saying check into facebook.
as these phones become more and morepopular over the next year nfc is going to be in every major phone release. expect to see it in the iphone 5. there's no way apple can leave it outat this point. look out for these little nfc symbols. if you've got a phone with nfc built in, you can read them, scan it, see what data is there, you might find some interestingsurprises. nfc can also be used for phone to phonecommunication as well. so you can use it to set up things like anad hoc wifi connection between
two phones for exchanging data, forexchanging contact information or smaller packets of information quickly. youliterally just take two phones, hold them together and exchange data. really really quick and useful nfc is not only going to change the world,it is already changing the world. if you've got nfc in your phone, if you've just picked up the samsung galaxy s3 go and give it a try. if you want to buysome of these chips by the way, some of these various chips you can get, you can get starter packs online for $20 to $30. british pounds you are looking about â£20 toâ£23.
you'll get a nice bundle basically. few of these, few of these
few of these, to try out basically. get some ordered and have a play with them,the technology is really really clever and extends the use of your phone intoa new area. that most people won't even have thought ofbefore. way to wow your friends.
