Smart watches to trigger automations using NFC tags

What would your opinion be if people tag you upwards of 100 times per hour? Do you want to be met with 1500 notifications when you come back after 15 hours? The rule is in place to protect the well known developers. And yes, some of them have shown me pictures of their avatar with thousands of notifications.

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Can apple watch work with the shortcuts app for NFC tags?

still shocked nothing is out to do this yet…

off topic: I do get your point. On the other hand: What else is a user supposed to do, if hey think someone could help (or even would be interested in the topic) - write a PN and spam their inbox with those 1500 ideas?

on topic: I have not fully understand if this is a hardware / wearOS limitation to scan NFC tags. Is there a chance that this could work in the future? I as well have not thought about such a limitation…

You don’t ping them. It’s that simple. Make your post without the ping, someone will answer your question eventually.

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It appears to be primarily a hardware limitation, in combination with Home Assistant not supporting it.

From a hardware perspective, my Google Pixel Watch 2 returns the following NFC features from adb shell pm list features | grep nfc:

feature:android.hardware.nfc.any
feature:android.hardware.nfc.ese
feature:android.hardware.nfc.hce
feature:android.hardware.nfc.hcef

However, according to Google, the NFC feature required is:

android.hardware.nfc

(reference: Google Issue Tracker)

I’m not seeing any comment from Google in that issue indicating this is a general WearOS limitation though – just a hardware limitation of all current watches. If some watch hardware did introduce support for it, at the moment Home Assistant doesn’t support it, as the relevant issue was closed as “Not Planned”.

(reference: Wear OS - NFC tag read · Issue #1829 · home-assistant/android · GitHub)

If you or anyone else does have hardware that supports it, then I’d recommend proving so by using the adb shell pm list features command above, and opening a new Home Assistant issue with the relevant information. And buy the devs a watch like yours so they can implement support for it :wink:

And what about the android device itself, can we use it as an NFC card?

I think that’s how they’re built.
An NFC which can be scanned by a reader, but not able to read a tag itself :frowning:

I am hoping this is just a matter of time for the right person to get annoyed by this and will have the technical skill to make a HACS integration to address this awkward limitation. To not be able to use your watch to scan a silly little NFC tag, but be able to do something far more dangerous from a security standpoint like make a payment at any retailer seems pretty ridiculous and just plain lazy.

It’s not a software limitation but a limitation in the hardware. Until Google (or other WearOS manufacturers) allow wearables to scan non-secure NFC tags, there isn’t any software that would really allow for this. At least not officially.

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Oh ok, I was not aware. Thanks for that. At the very least I can look forward to 1) not ever being able to get my watch to do this and 2) If it ever does become a thing, I will have to decide if the added benefit of NFC tag scanning is worth a new watch LOL #defeated

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Eh, to be fair, my Apple Watch doesn’t do it either. So, this isn’t just a Google thing.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/663142

I get it.

The not being privy to the “why” of it not being a thing is probably more frustrating than it not being a thing for me. It seems really silly for these “smart” watches to not be able to do this. They are what I would consider to be the top choice for something like this rather than a phone from a convenience standpoint. And in home assistant, NFC tags are pretty secure due to the nature of how they are created and used.

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From what I can gather, your watch is the programmable/encrypted tag and will work with powered NFC readers such as gym equipment or a payment terminal.

The device itself isn’t a reader - which is what I thought it was before I got mine.
By the time I realised it was too late to return it.

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I would be nice to have a tool on the smartwatch , so the TAG sends an unique value… So a reader can read the value, for opening a door for instance…

The cards in wallet for example always send a random value

I remember I used to do something similar with my Xiaomi watch. The NFC contact card for entering the office, I could scan it somehow (don’t remember if at the smartphone or the smartwatch, but I guess the phone), and then I used the watch for years and not the card.
So it would be a matter of scanning from the phone and then sending to the watch?

EDIT: Im sorry it’s fuzzy. Maybe it was a smartband or some kind of wearable. I think it was the first Xiaomi Watch, the chinese version. In any case, I was able to do that for years. Now with a new watch I’ve looked again for this, never realized it was such an issue…

Has anyone managed to get Mi smart watches to automate please?
https://www.reddit.com/r/miband/comments/nzt5wp/unlocking_a_door_with_mi_band_6_nfc_more_details/

In London you can travel on public transport without pressing anything on, at least, Apple Watch. There is a setting on the phone when you set up cards. This setting then gets transferred to watches.

Means there are two NFC capabilities. The usual one and one that continues to operate even if your battery is dead. I think the second one is just a RFID tag. This means a RFID reader attached to home assistant should work I think without doing anything.

There are lots of limitations on RFID on phones. To get my “EU settled status” after Brexit I had to make an appointment with the local government because my iPhone 6S could only transmit RFID and I needed to Read in my passport RFID. I suspect watch RFID ability is behind phone RFID so don’t know when reading RFID will be a thing.

Let’s try to request to Google to enable the feature to read any nfc tag on wear os:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/213599626?pli=1
:crossed_fingers:t2:

Them the home assistant apps would need the feature, but this can be done by the community.

Google cnat just enable it via code, hardware needs to support it and currently all watches only support NFC for payments. They require new hardware to read all NFC tags.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/213599626#comment39