I’m fairly new to Home Assistant and even newer to NFC so apologies if this is a stupid question however I’ve searched both Google and the forums and can’t find any up-to-date solutions for what I’m trying to do.
Basically I have an iOS mobile device and some NFC tags - I’ve set them up and can get them to work by doing the following:
Opening HA Companion → App Configuration → NFC tags → Read Tag → [scan] → “Fire event”
Using a 3rd party app like GoToTags → NFC → [scan] → Long press on the instruction link → Open in HA Companion → [scan]
Neither quite achieves the dream of [scan] → thing happens. I’m doing a simple light toggle while I get this working.
According to this guide ( How-to: Using NFC Tags to trigger device or home automations ) long links seem to be the solution, but when I follow the guide and use an app like NFC Tools to manually write the callback URL, HA Companion rejects the tag saying it is not a Home Asssistant Tag.
All I want to do is with as few steps as possible, scan an NFC tag and trigger an action with my iOS device. Any ideas?
Thank you in advance. I’ll pay the community back somehow
What kind of iPhone are you on? Background tag scanning (putting your phone near it and having scan work without launching an app in the middle) requires iPhone XS or later. The internal “read tag” functionality works for tags it writes for background support but is not a generic “scan and act on any NFC tag” button, hence the error you received.
Thanks for the reply - I’ve got an iPhone 11 Pro … background tag reading does not seem to be enabled – just seen that airplane mode disables this, I normally have airplane mode ON due to getting no GSM signal at home and it tanking my battery.
So now scanning the tag brings the popup and it’s 1 press for the action to be triggered. This is definitely good enough. Awesome! thank you
It is however not possible to automate an action without interaction on the phone? If you use an iOS native automation you can automate an action after scanning of an NFC tag, but with the HA Companion I always have to press the pop-up also, right?
Only Apple’s Shortcuts app is blessed to handle background NFC without tapping the notification, so if you do not want to interact you will need to set up a Personal Automation for the NFC tag on all devices which you want it to work on.
Yep indeed this seems to be the case. For my scenario, I need my partner to be able to scan the tag on her phone without setting up an iOS Shortcut, so the “1 tap” solution is going to have to do.
Going to jump on here as I’m trying to accomplish the same. When I scan the tag it want’s to fire an event. Can I just point it to an existing script or automation?