What is the easiest way to use a USB NFC card reader (for example ACR122U) with Home Assistant?
I’m using Home Assistant Container. Ideally I would just plug one in, mount the device into the container and let a Home Assistant integration create tag events. Is that possible?
Not USB based. But this works great for tag reading. I followed the plans and built my own.
Yeah, I saw that. If the USB one isn’t possible, I’ll build an ESP8266-based one. Will probably go for Tasmota instead of ESPHome as I already use that on other equipment and I can still use USB for power. It’s just that the USB reader comes complete with a case and cable and everything and it doesn’t need Wifi… all around it seems a better choice if it will be set up right next to the Home Assistant server (Pi).
I just realized… instead of going PN532 → ESP8266 → Wifi → Home Assistant I could just hook up the PN532 to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIOs directly.
However I cannot find any information on how to get the tags into Home Assistant. All I can find is either using the Tasmota integration or the ESPHome integration. Is there a generic API (REST? MQTT?) for that?
Nope, I gave up for now. It would have been just a gimmick anyway and it turned out to be a bit annoying. I hooked up a generic PN532-based reader to a Raspberry Pi and I tried all three connection types (serial, I2C and SPI) with the software that is available in Debian/Pi OS (I think it’s called nfc-tools.) Some of the connection types are just slow, some are flaky and require frequent restarts of the tool, all of them require polling. The last point might be a limitation of the hardware, but the protocol is complicated and the implementation in nfc-tools is documented rather poorly.