I am curious about the read speed of the FloJack NFC chip using the Flomio and the ACS MobileMate iOS app. Compared to getting a read using an ACR122, it seems very slow, taking a number of seconds to get a read. Is this due to the hardware, software or both?
Hi Ori, the short answer is that sending data over the audio jack is much slower than USB. Orders of magnitude slower in fact. The long answer is that in order to update the UI or play a scan sound when tags are discovered, a lot of reader management needs to happen behind the scenes. This can add to the perceived read time beyond extracting the tag data. With the Flomio SDK we have optimized the UUID read time of the FloJack to just under one second with scan sound and around half a second without. We have explored the option of including a speaker on the reader to improve user experience but still haven’t brought that to market. Here’s a video showing the difference using the Flomio SDK:
What are you looking to do with the reader that scan times are important? Are you just reading UUIDs or enumerating the whole tag data space? Our FloBLE design performs as well as the ACR122U because it uses Bluetooth as opposed to the Audio jack. Something worth considering.
That makes sense and confirms what we suspected. We were just reading UUIDs and noticed the difference in scan speeds between devices. We will certainly consider the BLE version. Thanks.
