Home Assistant Tags

This looks amazing. Is it possible to use my android phone to read NFC tag? If yes then I need to order only NFC tags and can use my android phone for testing to identify my use cases. And able to convince home minister. :wink:

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Hook it up to a LEGO Dimensions pad: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-jukebox-uses-lego-minifigures-to-play-songs

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While this sounds like a great thing, I have been struggling to think of a good use case for my needs, I now have one! :slight_smile:

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@adonno Where do you ship from, and how do you ship?

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I wonder, the smartphone itself is a NFC tag, is it supported to tap the phone to like open the door rather than bringing up a card from the pocket?

Struggle to find useful things to use this for, I use a lot of automations to detect and do things in the house. Like, opening the front door based on a trigger and a condition (for extra safety), this is fully automatic with no extra hardware outside, nothing to bring up from any pockets etc etc.

As I see it, the phone itself is the key and I would hope tapping the phone itself on the reader will work?

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why not just place NFC tags in your rooms, and swipe that NFC tag with your phone :slight_smile:

Well, why not BLE to sense what room the phone are in?
One thing is ā€˜cool to haveā€™ but for me it is ā€˜what makes the daily life simplerā€™

But hey, it is a really cool thing to show off :upside_down_face:

yeah, i have those NFC tags everywhere, also in my car, to deactivate the alarm for example when i am almost home :slight_smile:

But you can do all that with automations with some extra protection for false disarming/disablingā€¦ Then you donā€™t have to do anything. BUT, I see the NFC as a second way if you lost your phone on your way home :smiley:

I use GPS to trigger and a condition that my phone is connected to my WiFi to run the automation to unlock the door.

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Did a similar project before with a PN532 NFC connected to a Wemos D1 Mini with ESPHome. https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/60144826#60144826 (dutch)

Works very nice :slight_smile:

Can my iPhone 7 Plus take advantage of this new feature?
I know that newer models have automatic background tag scanning, iPhone 7 donā€™t, but it has NFC capabilitiesā€¦

So this is basically a powered nfc-tag ? Then its harder to see a usecase for it for me. I thought it could read and recognize rfid. Unfortunately the rfid tags we wear is just rfid and not nfc. I have some cards that are both, but have not found wearables that do both yet. I can write rfid tags so just need a reader to talk to HA.

Is there an obvious way to turn the device_id field in the event directly back to the mobile device that scanned the tag (or QR code)? Iā€™d rather not have to construct a table/dictionary to map these things only after discovering these values.

My goal is to be able to map the device_id back to the browser on the mobile device that I could then use browser_mod to switch tabs or perform other changes to the Home Assistant tab.

I could search for the user_id within all the person entities and then make some assumptions on the browser that user happens to be usingā€¦ but it would be great if Home Assistant can take these otherwise opaque values and follow those links for me. For instance, if thereā€™s a user_id present in the event, how about you also hand me back the person entity that corresponds to?

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Youā€™d probably still be able to use it, but because thereā€™s no background scanning on an iPhone 7, youā€™d have to first launch the app and navigate to App Configuration ā†’ NFC Tags ā†’ Read Tag button.

Having to do those extra taps limits some of the usefulness of course, but itā€™d let you play around with this feature.

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Hello,

How about the opposite way? Scanning your device on an NFC reader?
Iā€™ve configured one over ESPHome few weeks ago and realized my phone is giving a different ID everytime I was scanning it on the RFID reader. Is there a way to recognize oneā€™s device? It seems there was some parts of the phoneā€™s MAC address in the generated ID.

Thanks.

I love seeing that home assistant is adopting RFID as a more serious integration option. Iā€™ve been using ESPHome and RFID for months now and love it. Decoupling RFID from the phone works great, and opens up the usage to anyone in your house. Plus I hate having to carry my phone everywhere:). I find that once you show someone how to use it, it tends to be easier for visitors to use and understand than stuff just happening magically by automation. Iā€™ve been noodling on some 3d printable RFID ā€˜statueā€™ designs on and off with the goal to make the tags a bit more of a center piece to my living room coffee table and to further lower the bar to understand what theyā€™re used for. The ā€˜statuesā€™ use a sticker style tag, just slap a tag on the bottom. Anyone interested can find the designs here: https://www.prusaprinters.org/prints/40986-rfid-statues

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Ok, so a question. If I mounted an NFC tag or card inside a plastic housing mounted by my front door, I take it I would be able to scan it with my phone and unlock the door.

From a security perspective, is the device id only supplied by the phone and itā€™s not stored on the NFC card? I wouldnā€™t want someone with some kind of hacker tool to be able to read the card and get all the necessary info to clone a device and be able to unlock my door. It sounds like they might only be able to read the tag that I wrote to it.

May I ask what kind of script you had running on the raspberry pi solution?
I have some raspberry pies and an nfc reader lying around and would like to try this out :slight_smile:

NFC tag reading/writing in iOS 14.
Iā€™ll try my best to describe the issue Iā€™m experiencing.

I have a newish iPhone (capable of background NFC reading) and an NFC tag.
When Iā€™m trying to read the tag via iOSā€™s Shortcuts App > Personal automations > NFC - I can read the tag without problems.
However, when I try to use HA Companion App (current official version, not a beta) to read (or write) the very same tag, nothing happens.

I am not sure if the tag is writable, but from what I understand, even if it already has something written on it, the HA Companion should be able to read it.

Am I getting this all wrong, or am I experiencing a bug of some kind?

Thanks a lot to everybody who worked on this, this is brilliant.

I have it working with my Android phone and with a NodeMCU using esptool and this configuration.

Two questions:

  1. Even if I ā€œwriteā€ the tag with the companion app, the ID returned by the NodeMCU is different from the one returned by the phone. Is this intentional? Is there a way to have a single card return the same ID on every device?
  2. Is it always necessary to unlock the screen on Android? For me there is no effect if the screen is locked.