Author: alexl3

This week I worked on NFC research and learned about Android app development. I am also working on the design slides and the exact design of the NFC app. The design of the app itself should mirror Apple Pay’s tokenization system, and I will outline details in the design slides. I ordered the NFC reader from Amazon, which should be arriving next week. Overall, I think I am on track, but could start development on the app sometime this weekend.

For next week I need to get comfortable with the NFC framework for Android and learn how the to exactly control information flow from Android to NFC reader. I want to be able to get a skeleton of an app completed so I have more time to experiment with the finer details of NFC.

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.