Beginning NFC

Chapter 9. NFC on Embedded Systems

So far, we’ve seen the possibilities that NFC offers for mobile applications and physical interaction applications. There are other embedded device platforms besides Android, of course, and there are other physical interaction platforms besides Arduino. The most interesting at the moment are the embedded Linux systems like Texas Instruments’ BeagleBone and the Raspberry Pi project, supported by Broadcom. Both of these platforms provide the capability of running a Linux distribution on an ARM processor with a development board that’s less than $50. Both afford access to the physical input and output pins of the CPU as well. This makes them really fertile ground for projects that bridge the gap between the two platforms you’ve already seen. In this chapter, you’ll get an overview of the current state of NFC on these platforms, and get a brief introduction to programming NFC apps for them in Node.js.

Just as you saw with Arduino, the state of NFC tools on embedded Linux is somewhat less fully developed than the PhoneGap-NFC plug-in, or even than the standard APIs for Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone. The available libraries are generally lower level, providing access to the information at the lower end of the NFC stack. But there is a lot of interest in NFC from embedded developers, so the tools are developing quickly.

Warning

This chapter is not for those who are intimidated by the command line. You’ll see lots of CLI installs, configurations, ...