Uses for NFC tags? (Digital memo board?)

[morkus64]

Howdy all,

My wife and I are about to get android phones that support NFC. I was thinking of putting a few NFC tags around to make things a bit easier. Please tell me if these are possible, and share other thoughts!

- A tag near the front door to check the weather (probably just as easy to open up the app, but what the heck?)

- A tag near the front door to leave messages for each other (is this possible? Can an NFC tag actually store a short message?)

- Tags on the bedside table to set my alarm for different times.

- Tag for visitors to connect to our wifi.

Any other ideas? I love the concept of NFC, but am curious how useful it actually is in daily life.

 

[Jejunum]

I too am interested in this thread trying to come up with some utilities for NFC tags

-tags on the bottom of bluetooth devices (keyboard, speakers) to turn bluetooth on and off
-tag in car to turn on/off GPS bluetooth, increase volume, turn off wifi, car modes, start playing music?,
-taq at work to change data synch?
-NFC in wallet to use as business card
-NFC on laptop to turn on BT and tethering program

 

[QueBert]

All of those are possible, depending on which phone you have certain tags won't work. I have a Nexus 4 and Milfare 1k ones don't work. NTAG203 ones will work with any device, but only hold 140 bites of data. Enough for basic tags, and a short twitter like message. Anything more complex and you'll run out of space. The Milfare 1k are 700 bytes. Which is a lot more room to play around with. This is one of my tags for example:

turns my GPS on
turns my data on
sets volume to max
sets brightness to max
launches Navigation

it might do 1 other thing (don't have my phone on me) but I literally have 2 free bytes left after this. NFC Task Launcher is free in the store and really awesome. You can also use Tasker if you want to do some really complex stuff. And it might save on the byte usage, I dunno though. One thing I noticed is the NTAG203 claims 140 bytes but I think it's 280 or something, because my alarm tag's about 120, and I was able to create a 2nd action that was the same size on it. Basically when I tap it it sets my alarm, puts the ringer and notification sounds to 0 and does a few other things. When I tap it a 2nd time in the morning it reverses everything. All tags have an on/off state.

NFC Task Laucher's stupid easy to use, and the tags can be re-wrote like 500+ times, or can be write protected if you don't want them altered. I have about 10 tags around that do random stuff,

 

[robphelan]

where are you guys buying your NFC tags?

 

[Aristotelian]

A few NFC tags came for free with my Xperia Z. I'm interested in how best to use them as well.