Hello everybody. OK, today
we're going to take a little bit of a look at some technology that comes with the
Samsung Galaxy S3
but most people won't really have looked at in any great detail.
It's called NFC.
Near-field communication.
You'll have heard about this on things like your
Visa card and Mastercard that now have contactless payments so you just pop your
card on top of a reader and it bills what might be small purchases. Well,
that same technology that can also be used for making payments via a phone,
as soon as you pop your phone onto one of those readers,
it can also be used to store your own information and then so your phone can scan the tag
and do actions, whatever you happen to like it to do so you could create an
NFC tag
which turns your wifi on and off.
You could create an NFC tag which updates a database on the web, say you've checked
in somewhere you make an NFC that does Four Square checkins, sends a
status update to Facebook, whatever you want in 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 think also uses the same
technology on their underground
and New York?
Guys, tell me do you use contactless payment systems in New York subways?
Bit of NFC? So, anyway
NFC comes with a few different sizes. You might 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 substantially more 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 often for 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 known as bullseye NFC chips
these tend to be the most flexible, around 56k I think you can store onto them.
And that allows you to store a reasonable sized 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 compress the NFC
command that you're putting on to the chip to 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 bluetooth on and off, select a particular
hotspot
switch to bluetooth discovery, airplane mode, GPS,
there's loads of options in here, there's wifi on and off.
And it's a toggle, OK.
So what will happen is we're going to load 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 underneath the 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 so you 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 wifi on and off.
So, for instance, what I have is an NFC chip sat downstairs at my door and as I go out I
scan my phone against the chip and it turns my wifi off
on my phone, saves my battery. Likewise if I wanted to I could string a few
commands together and I could set it so it 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 be a massive boon for businesses
especially.
You know, if you've got one of these particular ones 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 more popular 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 out at 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 interesting surprises.
NFC can also be used for phone to phone communication as well.
So you can use it to set up things like an ad hoc wifi connection between
two phones for exchanging data, for exchanging contact information or smaller
packets of information quickly. You literally 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 buy some 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 £20 to £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 into a new area.
That most people won't even have thought of before. Way to wow your friends.