Professional Android Sensor Programming

Chapter 11

Near Field Communication (NFC)

What's in this chapter?

Describing NFC and relationship to RFID

Describing how NFCs work

Explaining sample code

If you've ever waved your credit card in front of a grocery checkout terminal, entered into your apartment or office building with a tap of a key fob, or installed an electronic toll collector under your car to zoom past the lines at the toll booth, then you are familiar with this seemingly invisible technology called radio frequency identification (RFID) and its subset technology, near field communication (NFC).

With the NFC hardware on the Samsung Nexus S and Samsung Galaxy Nexus, you can sense electronically enabled objects that come within close range of your device and read data from these objects. In addition, when two NFC-enabled Android devices meet, they can use NFC to submit data peer-to-peer. The inclusion of NFC on Android devices enables developers to create low friction interactions, such as those that are described throughout this chapter.

This chapter also gives you an overview of what these two contactless technologies are, outlines the advantages and disadvantages of NFC with Android, walks you through the tools and code needed to build a small NFC-enabled inventory system with the Android SDK, and wraps up by discussing the future of NFC on Android. As a bonus, some suggested use case scenarios are listed at the end of the chapter to jump start your own NFC development.

What Is RFID?

A discussion of NFC would ...