FloJack Troubleshooting

[ThomasParticipant]

I ordered a FloJack on October 30th. That same day, I received email stating ” we have experienced issues with the FloJack on iOS7+ and are still working to resolve them”. I instantly put a stop to the PayPal payment as I was not interested in a non-working product. I was contacted by Flomio and was assured this email was delivered in error and the current product (v 2.0) works just fine. I removed the stop on payment and my device arrived last week. Guess what? It doesn’t work! I have tried on two different devices and with two different NFC tags. The device does not function. I sent email to the info account, no response. I would appreciate someone at the company either fixing this product or (if not possible) immediately refunding my money.

Thank you.

:: Tom

[RichardKeymaster]

Hey Tom, the forums is much better for us to respond to than emails. The FloJack (v2) is very much operational and being used by dozens of customers in the field. The issue you are encountering has to do with the very basic function of the reader. To test out that your reader is working you can download the ACS MobileMate application from the App Store or Google Play. After installing, just plug in your FloJack and it should be instantly recognized. You’ll be able to then do some basic functions to interact with the reader and verify it’s operational. In order to read NFC tags you can follow instructions in this post.

[ThomasParticipant]

Then perhaps the device you sent me is defective. I have now tried it with both ACS MobileMate and NFC Actions applications. Both applications respond the device is attached, but neither application will read NFC tags.

[RichardKeymaster]

Try the following:

• Launch ACS MobileMate.
• Plug in FloJack reader and wait for it to be recognized.
• Select “Explore Device”. You should see the Firmware, Battery Level, and Reader ID fields populate. If so, this means you can talk to the reader form the app.
• Go back to Main Menu. Select “Explore Contactless Card”
• Place an NFC Forum compliant tag on the reader (directly over the “NFC” logo)
• Tap the “Answer-to-Reset (ATR)” field to put the NFC tag into reset and read it’s basic handshake data. You should see a string of bytes listed that looks like this:

  3B 8B 80 01 20 90 00 00 00 00 00 96 59 16 56 35

Getting the ATR is the most basic function to show that the reader’s contactless interface is operational. If you can’t get that far then perhaps the unit is defective.

[ThomasParticipant]

So looking at Explore Device, I see the data displayed. Trying to read and NFC tag it says “Cannot find device”. This tag reads fine off my phone.

[RichardKeymaster]

The issue might be the type of tag you are trying to read. The FloJack supports a subset of what a typical Android device can read. For instance, the current FloJack can’t read ISO15693 tags. Can you verify what type of tag you’re trying to read? A good application to get this info is NFC TagInfo on Google Play.

[ThomasParticipant]

Ok, I went out and bought different tags. These tags read on MobileMate. These tags still don’t read with NFC Actions.

[RichardKeymaster]

Great! The latest NFC Actions application with FloJack v2 support is currently under development and pending review from Apple. Once it’s released you should be all set.

[DaveParticipant]

Hi. We’re now at 15th December. Is the revised, working app now available? Did it not pass the review? Can you please let us know when this will be working? Thank you.

[RichardKeymaster]

Still haven’t gotten the app resubmitted to the App store. The new FloJack hardware, although compatible with iOS7+, is difficult to control for a good user experience. So we’re still working out those kinks and polishing our code base for easy integration with the other readers we support. We hope to get something out before the new year.

thanks,
Richard

[JacobParticipant]

the app store shows the current version was released on aug 2014. does that mean this app still hasn’t cleared apple review? Has it been resubmitted?

[RichardKeymaster]

Hey Jacob, we’ve yet to submit the new NFC Actions app to the Apple review. We’re working on clearing a more basic SDK app first that will simply provide UUID read capability with a web backend. We’re in the final stages of development this weekend so hope to have it submitted by next week.

[TraceyParticipant]

We have followed these instructions. The iphone will recognize the reader now, but keeps giving a “not responding” error and when we go to explore device we get “the flash data is corrupted”.

[TraceyParticipant]

Since I last posted, I have not received a reply about the “not responding” and “The flash data is corrupted” error messages. I have tried to return the flomio to the return address on the website and it was returned to me as undeliverable. Not Happy!

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Tracey, apologies for the issues. Seems UPS had some issues getting into our building and by the time we realized the problem they had already returned the shipment to sender. I’m pretty sure the unit you have is operational since we haven’t had any failures in the field after having sold 100’s. Are you certain it’s fully charged? We can send you a sample app of our own if you share you’re iOS device UDID with us. You can find your device UDID by going to this website on your unit: http://get.udid.io/

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