Reading RFID with Android phones

Question

I did enough research on reading RFID tags using Android phones smart phones     My understanding of this is that for NFC-enabled smart phones  Nexus S  it is possible to read RFID tags  but there are restrictions   For non-NFC-enabled Androids we need a RFID reader to which we can communicate from Android using Bluetooth   My question is    What are the SDK which we use for reading RFID tag from Android Phone NFC enabled   If I have to read using Non NFC enabled phone  is there any standard reader available who provides SDK for development purpose

User · Answer

I recently worked on a project to read the RFID tags. The project used the Devices from manufacturers like Zebra (we were using RFD8500 ) & TSL.

More devices are from Motorola & other vendors as well!

We have to use the native SDK api's provided by the manufacturer, how it works is by pairing the device by the Bluetooth of the phones and so the data transfer between both devices take place! The programming is based on subscribe pattern where the scan should be read by the device trigger(hardware trigger) or soft trigger (from the application).

The Tag read gives us the tagId & the RSSI which is the distance factor from the RFID tags!

This is the sample app:

We get all the device paired to our Android/iOS phones :

get device list

connect

connected

Scan

User · Answer

A UHF RFID reader option for both Android and iOS is available from a company called U Grok It     It is just UHF  which is  non-NFC enabled Android   if that s what you meant   My apologies if you meant an NFC reader for Android devices that don t have an NFC reader built-in   Their reader has a range up to 7 meters   21 feet    It connects via the audio port  not bluetooth  which has the advantage of pairing instantly  securely  and with way less of a power draw   They have a free native SDK for Android  iOS  Cordova  and Xamarin  as well as an Android keyboard wedge

User · Answer

You can use a simple  low-cost USB port reader like this test connects directly to your Android device  it has a utility app and an SDK you can use for app development  https   www atlasrfidstore com sls-rfid-smartmicro-android-micro-usb-reader

User · Answer

NFC enabled phones can ONLY read NFC and passive high frequency RFID  HF-RFID   These must be read at an extremely close range  typically a few centimeters  For longer range or any other type of RFID active RFID  you must use an external reader for handling them with mobile devices   You can get some decent readers from a lot of manufacturers by simply searching on google  There are a lot of plug in ones for all device types   I deal a lot with HID readers capable of close proximity scans of HID enabled ID cards as well as NFC from smart phones and smart cards  I use SerialIO badge readers that I load a decryption profile onto that allows our secure company cards to be read and utilized by an application I built  They are great for large scale reliable bluetooth scanning  Because they are bluetooth  they work for PC Android iOS Linux  The only problem is  HID readers are very expensive and are meant for enterprise use  Ours cost about  400 each  but again  they read HID  SmartCards  NFC  and RFID   If this is a personal project  I suggest just using the phone and purchasing some HF-RFID tags  The tag manufacturer should have an SDK for you to use to connect to   and manage the tags  You can also just use androids NFC docs to get started https   developer android com guide topics connectivity nfc   Most android phones from the last 8 years have NFC  only iPhone 6 and newer apple phones have NFC  but only iOS 11 and newer will work for what you want to do

User · Answer

First is understanding that RFID is very generic term  NFC is subset of RFID technology  NFC is used for prox card  credit cards  tap and go payment system  Your phones can read and emulate NFC  Apple pay  Google pay  etc    if they support NFC  NFC is very short distance and low power - which is why you see tap and go type usage   The more common RFID are the tags you see here and there  They come in a wide ranges of styles  uses and frequency   HF - high frequency tags are what they use for  chipping  animals - cattle  dogs  cats  Read range is about 12 inches and requires an external antenna that is powered the bigger the antenna the more power it needs and the further it can read   UFH tags look similar to HF tags but have a read range of several feet   Also HF tags come single read and multi read  UFH is exclusviely multi read   Mutiread means when a reader is active  you can litterally read about 1700 tags in under 10 seconds   But this is a function of the size of the antenna and how much power you can push through the reader   As to the direct question about Android and RFID - the best way to go is to get an external handheld reader that connects to your mobile device via Bluetooth  Bluetooth libraries exist for all mobile devices - Android  Apple  Windows  From there its just a matter of the manufacturer documentation about how to open a socket to the reader and how to decode the serial information   The TSL line of readers is very popular because you don t have to deal with reading bytes and all that low level serial jazz that other manufactures do  They have a nice set of commands that are easy to use to control the reader   Other manufactures are basic in that you open a serial socket and then read the output like you would see in terminal app like PuTTY

User · Answer

You can hijack your Android audio port using an Arduino board like this  Then  you have two options  as far as I m concerned    1  Buy another Arduino Shield that supports RFID  I haven t seen one that supports UHF so far   2  Try to connect your Arduino hijack with a USB RFID reader and build some embedded hardware kit   Right now  I m working in the second option but with iPhone

[android] Reading RFID with Android phones

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