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Using libnfc with the PN532 (Linux)

Saturday, February 19, 2011

While there is no dedicated project page (yet) for the new NFC PN532 Breakout Board, if you want to test it out using the open-source libnfc library in Linux, the following steps will help you to get started with the included libnfc examples.  This tutorial was tested using Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop.

Step 1: Download the latest version of libnfc (ex. "libnfc-1.4.1.tar.gz") and extract the contents

$ wget http://libnfc.googlecode.com/files/libnfc-x.x.x.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf libnfc-x.x.x.tar.gz
$ cd libnfc-x.x.x

Step 2: Configure libnfc for PN532 and UART*

$ ./configure --with-drivers=pn532_uart --enable-serial-autoprobe

*Note: libnfc can also be built in debug mode by adding '--enable-serial-autoprobe' (minus the single quotes) to the configure options

libnfc ./configure results

Step 3: Build and install libnfc

$ make clean
$ make
$ make install

Step 4: Check for installed devices

$ cd examples
$ ./nfc-list

Step 5: Try to read a 13.56MHz card (mifare, etc.)

$ ./nfc-poll

nfc-poll results

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Tags:  NFC RFID PN532 libnfc

New Product: PN532 NFC/RFID Breakout

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

PN532 NFC Breakout BoardWe just added another new wireless board to the website, the PN532 NFC Breakout.  These breakout boards make it easy to get started with 13.56MHz RFID/NFC.  The PN532 from NXP can be used as a basic RFID reader, for peer-to-peer communication, or to emulate a variety of 13.56MHz RFID tags (turning the board into an RFID tag itself).

If you're interested in NFC or ISO14443, we'd recommend taking a look at libnfc, a very well-written and open-source NFC library that supports this chip out of the box -- just hook up 3.3V, GND, TXD and RXD to any USB to UART adapter and you're ready to go.

There's currently no project page for this board, and not much in the way of tutorials, but the forum over at the libnfc website has a lot of helpful information, and we'll try to add some basic tutorials and code samples in the coming months.

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Tags:  NFC RFID PN532 libnfc