Gadgetory

in a recent video we showed you some cool things you could do if you were running CyanogenMod and had an nfc-enabled phone switching profiles and well some other cool stuff but what if you're not running a custom ROM what cool things can you do with NFC chips I'm Joe Levi this is PocketNow let's go take a look so the first thing that I want to mention is not all NFC stickers or tags are created equal this one over here cost me about a dollar and a quarter dollar and a half it is I paid a little bit more because it's an outdoor compatible sticker so you peel off the backing and you have a nice adhesive back there it's kind of tacky not too much but it sticks really well and on the front you have this nice vinyl cover you can kind of see it's probably not going to show through on the video you can see where the microchip is kind of where the traces to the antenna are and it's a little bit flexible so if you wanted to put it on a curved surface you could do that now this overall is very nice except the chip that's inside it can only handle up to 46 bytes not kilobytes bytes relatively small still you can do cool stuff with it you can put CyanogenMod profiles on it like we showed you in the last video if you missed that click the link right there but you can't put say your business card other than some very basic information web URL not a problem plain text as long as it's not too much your business card if it's a really basic one you bet what you need is something a little bit more beefy than that that's what this is sort of essentially the same thing again sticky back like that this is a hard kind of PVC it's got a nice Android logo on it and this one comes from tags for Droid comm about the same price a dollar and a half a piece here but this not flexible in the slightest all the stuff inside it should be a little bit more durable because it's not as thin as the vinyl covered one over here but it also can carry up to seven hundred and sixteen bytes again that's bytes now I ran into some issues putting my business card over on here my v card because it's got a picture associated with it you know when people call I like to see their picture that's because it's part of my contact or their contact information in my phone well my contact I want to do the same thing but pictures are too big in fact with my picture it was about 7,300 bytes a little bit more than that so as long as I take my picture out I'm great you can do it just fine so let's see what kinds of cool things we can do for the purpose of this example I'm going to put this one aside and we'll just use this new fangled one but we're gonna need an app there are two apps that I want to show you today the first one is called tag writer we'll go right into that and it essentially does exactly what you'd expect it to do it has I'm actually in the professional view right now which gives me a few more menu options you can toggle that by going into your preferences but I can scan a QR code and convert that into an NFC data set and then store that to an NFC chip kind of cool I can share an NFC data set just device to device I can look at the history of what I've done I've got some tools tools are really helpful because I can erase I can full erase I can do all kinds of stuff full erase is the same as a race but it overwrites with random data so let's go ahead and do that here I've written something on to that let's securely erase the content and just do that keep it right there it erases and overwrites I believe three or four times and realises the the chip now you see that this is a My Fair tag that's the type it does have seven hundred and sixteen bytes and the the previous content was something else which I don't even know what that is but we're all done very cool these chips come unformatted so just like a floppy disk way back in the day that we had to format you may want to come in here I just do an erase and that initializes it and everything has been just fine couple things otherwise that you can do once you've got a an NFC chip programmed you may want to write protect that there are a couple ways that you can do it you can either do a soft protect which is simply setting it as read-only it's like on your computer you've got that read-only flag on your file attributes well if you want to write to it you just take that check mark out and update it and you're done so that's what that is you can reuse the chips over and over and over again but it's going to have an extra level of protection that says hey this is right protected are you sure you want to override it yes okay and then it does it and then you've got permanent protect permanent is permanent it will lock the contents permanently into read-only they cannot be changed at all if you're distributing these you may want to do that permanent but I'd recommend you experiment first before you go in and do some permanent stuff because the tags aren't cheap and then of course we have clean so you can just factory reset the tag right there and that's in the Tools menu so over here we can read and view the content from an nfc-enabled item let's do that with the tag that we just erased see what it says content is empty just like that alright so we could read something else or we can move on to something else we'll move on let's go ahead and create and write we'll open this up you can see some of the stuff that I've done ok and here is my contact I've already created this so let's go ahead and tap that I can write multiple times I can protect it I can choose if I want to confirm the overwrite which is kind of just a pain and then it goes an extra step further it says based on this which is 713 bytes it'll work on any one of these the Mifare classic 1k which is what I'm using the DESFire which holds a bit more the Mifare classic 4k yada yada yada and on and on and on if I wanted to put my picture in my business card I could use this which is seven point six K roughly I don't have that they're more expensive so we're just going to use that one but it's nice that this program tells you what chips you can write to and which ones you can't for example let me come back to this other one remember that one really small let's go ahead and try and write to it so we'll say next got my sticker down there put that there and nope can't do it store failed because I don't know it doesn't tell us so let's go ahead and try that again come back over here we'll write this next see if it gives us a better message this time around and right there store failed because the data set is too large so this was not initialized first when I set it up and tried and it failed it initialized the chip write it again which we did there and it said oh hey oh no you can't do that because it's too big okay so let's go to a bigger chip that's that one and let's go back and write the contact again this will take a minute because it's a little bit bigger but there you go it's already in there and everything's great now when I scan this put my phone on it again I don't have to run in the app I just have to have NFC turned on of course I have to have an NFC enabled device to be able to do that but it will then ask me which address book I want to store this in I have to address books my gmail and my exchange server so it'll ask me which one and then right there I've got that business card already put in so really kind of nice let's go ahead and erase this again that's under tools so in tools we're just gonna do a quick erase that and just like that it's erased it does backup the content so if you did that on accident you can quickly and easily restore it really kind of nice but that's not the coolest thing you can go ahead and do other stuff I can get back in there for you if we want to go to Joe Levi dot we can write Jolie viacom as a URL just like that and then when I come in here and scan that it automatically fires my browser and puts that URL in the address bar launches it up for me just fine I don't have Wi-Fi turned on so it's taking a little bit longer to do that overall pretty cool you can also go in and do some some other cool stuff you can see down here I've put in a different contact I put in some plain text with sending that to my wife wasn't that sweet of me and just you know other cool stuff but there's something else really cool that I want to show you and that's another app