Hi guys,
Wow am I glad to have found this forum. I'm recent graduate in engineering and I managed to get a job building small prototypes for an engineering company. One of the first projects they have me on is building a custom NFC reader. I've chosen to use the TRF7970a EVM for the proof of concept prototype and have recommended to our client that for the finished product they use the same chip with some flavor of the MSP430 on a custom board.
The job requires creating an antenna for the reader that is a cylinder and is meant to read a co-centric cylindrical tag (ISO 15693 w/ antenna). I've done this by cannibalizing some flexible tags printed on a polymer substrate and using their antennas. They work great, except... it only seems to want to read flat tags that that are outside the cylinder of the reader antenna, any suggestions for improving signal strength of co-centric tags would be much appreciated. I think it should work since the spacing is very small and and from my understand NFC is basically operating on mutual inductance, but alternatively an explanation for why this is impossible would be a much needed reality check as well.
The other question I have is hopefully merely an indication of my ignorance when it comes to firmware. When the reader reads the tag I would like to display the UID of the tag on a microview (
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which has in it an ATmega328 microcontroller inside capable of communicating over SPI, I2C, USART, etc. Is it possible and/or easy to get the UID off the tag without going through TI's desktop GUI and communicate it straight to the microview?
Thanks for your help, and thank you TI for making this forum exist!
Alex
