Here is a demo of hacking a "SAD" lamp to become a colour lamp that can be controlled by placing an NFC-enabled smartphone near it - in this case, an Android Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

• Any physical object can present a UI when you hold a smartphone nearby!

When you place a smartphone near it, the NFC connection is made and the lamp tells the phone what app to launch. If the app isn't found, it can be automatically downloaded from the Play Store! Then a colour wheel is presented which can be used to select the lamp colour.

The demo was built with a LPC1768 Cortex-M3 MCU connected via SPI to a PN532 NFC chip (we're using Adafruit's NFC breakout board), and via PWM to a high-power RGB LED using some LED drivers. The phone is a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android.

We chose to retrofit the demo in to a "SAD" lamp to get an easy diffuser for the LED. The great thing about using NFC is there are no buttons or interfaces on the device, simply a power lead (although a device could even be battery powered so there are no interfaces or cables!)

Here is the basic construction of the prototype in to the lamp body:

Build your own¶

Hardware¶

Software¶

The code is available here!

Get Started with NFC¶

For more info on how to use NFC with mbed, visit the NFC handbook page