Near-Field Communication technology has a wide variety of use cases, let’s see how we can use it in our cross-platform Flutter apps.
What exactly is NFC?
NFC (Near-Field Communication) actually describes a range of communication technologies that can be used to communicate between two devices over a short distance (depending on the hardware, in my tests up to 3 cm). Often one of the devices comes without any form of power source (for example the sticker above, the passive part) and is powered by the other device wireless (your phone for example, the active part). NFC hardware is available in a wide range of types from stickers over plastic cards, little keychain tokens to clothes with sewn in chips. The actual chips also come with different features, like:
- Different supported protocols/storage formats (more later on)
- Storage size (ranges from a few bytes up to 32 KB)
- Read/Write speed
- Build in hardware encryption (like CRYPTO 1, 3DES, AES128)
- Reading Distance (requires a special reader, up to 1.5 m with for example NXP ICODE SLIX)
- Write lock support, read…
