We changed our project idea from Webcam activated lock system to an NFC activated lock system. This week I did a lot of research on NFC, basically trying to understand everything surrounding it, mainly using a book called Beginning NFC (found in O’Reilly books from the website). No development yet because we do not have our parts yet and I still need to understand how NFC would work in our system because of a recent pivot from facial recognition to NFC. A problem I have found out this week is that although iPhones have NFC technology, iPhones cannot emulate an NFC tag except for the case of Apple Pay. No other development tools are provided for peer to peer NFC. iPhones can only read/write to NFC tags. Android, on the other hand, has a lot of developer resources for peer to peer NFC. I am doing research this weekend on how I can workaround the iPhone peer to peer NFC problem, possibly looking into developing a separate app for this purpose. Next week I will do more research and start working on learning Swift and how to develop the app we are going to use.
Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Fall 2020: Alex Li, Alex Xu, Michael Chen (Team A5)