Revision as of 14:37, 5 November 2015

Compatible NFC devices

In this section we try to sum up the devices that are compatible with libnfc. Some of these products come from the same manufacturer and are just repackaged under a different brand name and sold by other resellers and vendors. They are grouped per interface driver. This list is probably far from complete, but we try to make it as accurate as possible.
Let us know in the community if you know more about certain products.

We encourage manufacturers to contact us for new PN53x-based products so we can test and support them in the future.

Special thanks to microBuilder for building the first open design NFC board and adafruit that offers the board it for a very good price!

Important note for beginners: currently, the ACR122 device (and variant like touchatag) is the easiest product to buy but it also have the worst support: the device causes many problems with libnfc (and underlayer PC/SC) and somes are not fixable (ie. emulation is bogus)

Consumer electronics readers

Dongle

[1] Under Linux a proprietary PCSC driver is available, which can be handy for PCSC applications but is incompatible with the direct access required by libnfc through libusb so this driver or pcscd must be stopped before using libnfc.

Flat

[1] ASK LoGO device has some electronics to drive the antenna and permit some progressive field power up, which is useful to handle some unreliable ISO14443-B tags but this hack has as side-effect that the antenna does not support retro-modulation anymore, so the target mode could not be used on this device (in DEP or card emulation).

[2] ACS ACR122 devices rely on PCSC which does not allow to cancel/abort a command, so all asynchronous commands (commands with delayed reply) could fail with timeouts, which makes ACR122's target support very limited and unstable.

OEM readers