NFC not picked up by phone

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2016-12-13 by mccabe

Hey,
Just got my pucks this morning and am really enjoying them so far, I just hit one snag with NFC, my phone (Nexus 6P) will not pick up the device via NFC, by comparison I have some other NFC tags (whiztags) that are working as expected.

I've tried the following:

• out of the box NFC config (ie redirect to puck site) isn't picked up by the phone
• explicitly setting a new url with NRF.nfcURL isn't picked up by the phone

NRF.nfcURL("http://espruino.com");

I have updated the firmware to 1v89 (one thing with the instructions there is that to select the firmware zip with nRF Connect on Android you have to press and hold on the firmware zip rather than just press - that threw me for a while).
/John

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2016-12-13 by mccabe

I've just checked with my second puck and its working as expected, any ideas on how to debug NFC on the first puck? Note that the second puck is still on 1v88.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2016-12-13 by @gfwilliams

That's odd - as soon as you do reset() or save() on the Puck it'll remove the built-in NFC URL, but NRF.nfcURL("http://espruino.com"); should work.

You could try lighting up an LED based on the NFCon and NFCoff events? http://www.espruino.com/Reference#l_NRF_NFCoff

You could also try comparing the Puck PCBs to see if something is amiss - on the PCB at the bottom-right corner of the bluetooth module it says D7. To the right of that there should be two white components. Those are the tuning capacitors for NFC - the only components that are part of it - so if one of them looks like it has a problem that could cause it?

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2016-12-13 by mccabe

Nothing looks odd on the puck with the NFC problem, definitely seems to be something wrong, running the following on both pucks results in one not getting picked up and the second working perfectly (yay).

NRF.nfcURL("http://espruino.com");
NRF.on('NFCon', function() { LED1.write(true);});
NRF.on('NFCoff', function() { LED1.write(false);});
save()

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2016-12-13 by mccabe

Aaaaaand its working..

I followed the reset steps at the bottom of this page, saved the test code above and its now working (need to play with it a bit more to be sure).

Sorry for the false alarm.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2016-12-13 by @gfwilliams

Glad it's sorted! The NFC behaviour is a bit confusing.

The general idea was: if you start playing around with Puck.js you probably don't want NFC to go to the getting started page again - but it can be confusing if you were doing stuff and it just stops working.

Also, it's possible that there is a bug and it somehow got confused. If it happens again you could try forcing it off with NRF.nfcURL(); and then turning it back on with NRF.nfcURL("http://espruino.com");

... just to add - at least on my tablet, NFC won't be picked up if you already have the webpage you're pointing at open in the browser