Mac OSX software for NFC Readers/Writers

Tagged: ACR122u, Login screen, MacOSX, NFC Reader App, Screen Unlock

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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July 11, 2013 at 7:07 am #4075

Kirk
Participant

Hi guys:

I just received my ACSNFC Reader (and other goodies) from you guys. Is there any software for Mac OSX that works with this NFC reader/writer? ACS seems to only have PC installers, while I can find the Mac Drivers, I don’t want to try to roll my own. I can install Parallels and put the PC version on, but I would prefer I native Mac App. With iOS being a key supported function, and iOS Dev requires a Mac, it seems pretty crucial to have a Mac based NFC reader. Thanks.

July 11, 2013 at 12:49 pm #4078

Richard
Keymaster

Hey Kirk, glad you got your order. There’s a MacOSX installer on the ACR122U product download page that maybe you overlooked. Find it here. That’ll get you the latest driver tweaks from ACS. The native drivers, however, that come with MacOSX Lion should work fine. They’re from an open source project authored by Ludovic Rousseau, a certifiable bad a$$ in the NFC space. The project consists of two components, PCSC-lite and CCID. PCSC-lite is a smartcard abstraction layer and CCID manages the contactless card low level protocols. Since NFC cards are nothing more than wireless smartcards, you can write software that interfaces through the PCSC well known standard and have it run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Before Android joined the NFC Party we were pretty heavily invested in this PC-as-a-host direction. I dug up a Python script that I wrote back then. It may help you along. It leverages the open source python projects, NFCpy and Pyscard, to talk to the PSCS interface (PCSC-lite) and ultimately the ACR122u reader. NFCpy implements all the high level NFC Forum startards like NDEF formatting and R/W operations that I think you’re most interested in. This will allow you to prepare simple scripts to write URL’s into NFC tags, for instance.

I can help you if you wanna dive into this code, but if you rather spend money you can try out Tagstand’s terminal tag writer app for MacOSX. It’s $30 and does the same thing as the code I linked above (with some tweaks of course), but comes with some support. Might be the safer bet if you’re running in a time crunch and the Flomies are hard to get a hold of. With FloJacks starting to ship this week, that might be the case in the short term.

Richard and the Flomies.

July 11, 2013 at 9:16 pm #4126
Kirk
Participant
Hi Richard, thanks for that. I had found the Tagstand app and thought $30 was a bit steep for a ‘Beta’ terminal app. But then again, it should work, and if you think it is OK for the job, probably worth saving my own time. Perhaps you guys should look at writing a MAC GUI app for NFC, I think it would be a winner, especially with your Kiosk offering, and effectively ‘close the flomie loop’ on the Apple Universe.
- This reply was modified 11 years, 4 months ago by Kirk.
- This reply was modified 11 years, 4 months ago by Kirk.
January 1, 2015 at 11:55 am #35928

Henrik
Participant

Hi Richard.

Do you know of any way to use the ACR122U and a NFC tag to unlock the screen on MacOSX?

Cheers,
Henrik

February 3, 2015 at 2:55 pm #41647
Richard
Keymaster
Hey Henrik, I have a good understanding of how to get the ACR122u or FloBLE to provide the right credentials for this use case. However, the hard part is how to write the OSX application to manage and unlock the screen in Yosemite. I know this is possible given the KnockToUnlock implementation but I haven’t tried it. Were you able to get anywhere?

The best option for reading NFC tags from a PC/Mac is with the ACR1255U-J1 or ACR122U readers. Both of these readers are readily available, connect over USB and are supported by open source tools for PCSC readers.
- This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Richard. Reason: Added latest open source tools for reading NFC tags
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