Getting Started

What you’ll need

You’ll need a few bits to get started with the project.  It’s possible you already have Android phone or tablet that has support for Near Field Communication.  Samsung products generally support NFC and so do google reference devices (e.g. the Nexus product line). If you have any device with NFC it will be fine for testing purposes.

Nexus 7 (2013 edition)

  • A Near Field Communication (NFC) Android tablet, phone or phablet. Note: I’ve developed and tested working with the Nexus 7 (2013 model).  These can be picked up on ebay for under £100 a piece.  It is likely to work with other Android NFC devices – but it remains untested.
  • A small collection of NFC tags (I’ll explain where you can buy these from later)
  • An application that I’ve created to make the magic happen: NFC Tour Guide

NFC tags

 

You’ll also need your own content, which currently can be:

  • Video files
  • Audio files
  • Images

 

And finally to add the data to the NFC tags – you’ll need a piece of software that writes to them.  My favourite is: NFC Tasks.  To make my life easier I’ve got this software installed on a second NFC enabled phone (although you can run all it all from the same device),

So we’ll start with describing the basic premise which shows you how to get ‘content triggering’ up & running.  If you deploy this for real then you’ll want to read my advanced tips later on – as it shows you how to speed up the whole process and make it much easier to change the content in the future.

Next: Content time

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