NFC is starting to appear built-in to smartphones, and is going to create all sorts of opportunities for creating new embedded devices, and reinventing old ones. NFC is a very short range radio (near-field communication) that can be used to enable two devices to communicate when they come in to close proximity.

Here is an early peek at some work we are doing to help enable rapaid prototyping with NFC.

During testing:

Final demo:

(full demo coming soon!)

The NFC interface is recognised by the phone, and it automatically downloads the related application from the android app store. That means you can walk up to the device even though you've never interacted with it before, wave your phone nearby, and its UI gets downloaded automagically! Talk about superb user experience.

When you hold your NFC-enabled phone up to the lamp, its UI appears; a colour wheel to manipulate the LED. Obviously this is just a simple example showing off the concept of a device presenting a rich UI via a smartphone, but could also do things like bridge to the internet etc.

The Technology¶

The LPC11U24 Cortex-M0 MCU brain is connected via SPI to a PN512 NFC chip, and via PWM to the high-power RGB LED using some LED drivers.

We chose to retrofit the demo in to a "SAD" lamp to get an easy diffuser for the LED. There 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!)

Thi sis just an early peek. If you are interested in NFC, join our mailing list to get more information on this project as it evolves:

• Join the mbed Mailing List