I have been using the tag reader for 5 months as a garage door open/close.
It is mounted outside in a plastic electrical box. There is a hole in it to expose the led. And there is a buzzer as well.
The power wire runs throgh the outside of the house to my garage and is plugged in to an outlet with a 5v usb adapter/plug.
There is also a Unifi access point in the garage that shows it is available.
It does show that it has a 90% signal strength.
The problem is that in ESPHome it has never showed it as ever being online, though it is online.
Also some days it works and most others it does not.
The option in Unifi to “Automatically optimize” networks, used to turn off multicast, which breaks mDNS which ESPHome relies on to determine the node is alive. It might be worth checking that.
I would be really interested in the details of you Magic Jukebox.
Especially:
How do you read you black / white constallation?
What hardware have you used for the buttons?
The case, can you share the making files?
Have you developed your own cicuit? If so, would you be able to share it?
@schmurtz
Concluded, if you would be able to document it, e.g. in Github and Thingverse, this would be awesome!
I would really like to build this one for my 4 years old kids to play their favorit music from Spotify or local media e.g. on a Amazon Echo…
And by the way, I am not sure how others think about it, but in my opninion, this is a must have device! Really brilliant funtionality and the case is just incredible!
@adonno
Hi, would that kind of tag be compatible with the DIY reader from your github ?
Will I be able to “flash” them with my phone ?
If no, do you have any link for some keychain tag that is compatible and that I can flash with my phone ?
I don’t think those RFID tags would be writeable and useful. You want an NFC tag that’s listed with NTAG215 or NTAG213 (the differences being the amount of storage - either would work for Home Assistant to store a URL.)
I don’t want to store any URL, I just want the keychain tag to be recognized by HA to enable/disable my home alarm.
The ones you linked look very much like the ones I did btw.
don’t want to store any URL, I just want the keychain tag to be recognized by HA…
When you use the Home Assistant mobile application to write a tag, it creates an NDEF URL record on the tag that contains a distinguished URL that smells like this:
The Home Assistant mobile applications register that https://www.home-assistant.io/tag URL prefix with the OS, so when the tag is scanned by your phone, it’s used to launch and pass the scanned URL to the application. The Home Assistant app then posts that event to Home Assistant that then drops a tag_scanned event on it’s event bus. Or something like that.
So you need a tag with enough storage space to hold that NDEF URL record; I think in practice this means just about any NFC tag that has any amount of storage space that can be written. That’s like 63 bytes for that NDEF record and it fits with a little bit of space to spare on an NTAG213-style tag, which is the smallest one that I’ve commonly seen advertised.
While not using it for an alarm, one of my applications for an NFC tag is a sticker stuck by the front door. When it gets scanned by the Home Assistant app on my phone, it tells the Z-Wave lock to unlock itself. This is occasionally handy for when entering the per-user code on the keypad isn’t the best solution.
Is it possible to just scan an NFC card and use its pre-existing serial number (device id) that’s already on the card rather that having to first write the new Home assistant URL to the tag
The Home Assistant app will always write this URL to a tag first.
I have a potential use case in mind for this NFC tag integration but it would require reading the existing tags without having to first append the extra home assistant specific URL to them.
It’s for an asset tracking. Each item already has an NFC sticker attached
We’ve tested with the URL writing method using the Home Assistant app and while it works, it’s unnecessary overhead.
Even when you write the URL to the tag, the serial number remains, the URL is just appended to the card.
Yes. I have a few NFC tags I bought on Ebay and have not coded anything onto them. When I scan them with my phone the Tag ID gets used and that is what I used to trigger the automations.
- id: d647683e-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx
alias: Reticulation Station 1 NFC Tag # Scanning the NFC tag will either run / stop the front garden retic
trigger:
platform: event
event_type: tag_scanned
event_data:
tag_id: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx #redacted
action:
service: input_boolean.toggle
entity_id: input_boolean.retic_station_1_run
How do you get the Home Assistant application on the phone to capture the NFC tag scanned event and forward it to Home Assistant?
I know the technique you show works with an ESPHome-based reader project, where it forwards all the tag scanning events to Home Assistant. In my case, I have a mix of mobile phone devices and dedicated ESP8266-based readers and I wanted the same sort of action to occur in both cases.
When I scan an NFC tag that’s not been written with anything, I get a “Choose An Action” dialog that allows me to select between “Tasker” and “Tags” (which appears to be some Android NFC service). the Home Assistant mobile application never gets that unprogrammed tag passed to it.
Of course, if I write the tag with the Home Assistant app, it installed an NDEF URL record with the URL prefix that gets routed to the app…
It’s been a while since I both setup a Tag or even scanned one as I got them back when this was first released to play with but haven’t really utilised them yet so I can’t fully remember the process. I do know for certain though that they would scan and be actioned by HA without needing to open the app.
