NFC smart cards have a small limited space (a few bytes) to store all kinds of data. These cards are usually used to store information in them, but how are they used? How can we check the information stored on a smart card? And how to add new information to it?
To read and write information we must ensure, first of all, that our device has an NFC reader installed on it and that we have it activated and, second, we must download and install the NFC TagWriter application for free from the Play Store .
Once the application is installed, we execute it on our device and we can see a window similar to this one.
This application allows you to make several configurations that, although we are going to focus on how to read and how to write on a smart card, we will also talk about the others:
- View: Allows us to see the information stored on the card.
- Create, write and store: Allows us to write on the card.
- Copy: It allows us to copy one NFC card to another.
- Tools: Erase or protect the cards.
- History: History of the scanned cards.
- Share: Share information on a card with another device.
- Scan QR Code: Scan a QR code from the camera.
How to write content on an NFC card
The first thing we are going to do is click on the "Create, write and store" entry. We will see a window similar to the following:
We click on "New" first to add new information to the card we are going to write. Next we will see all the type of content that we can add, for example, a contact, a web link, email, plain text, etc.
In our case we are going to introduce a plain text on the chip, for this we click on "Plain text" and we will see the following.
Once written, click on "Next" and we will see the following options window.
Here we can configure, for example, if we are going to write several cards, protect the writing card, add a launcher, etc. In our case we leave it by default and click again on "Next".
The next step is to write on the card. To do this we simply bring the card to the back of the device and wait a few seconds for the writing to finish.
Once finished we can see a summary of the process. The information on the card has been saved correctly.
How to view the contents of an NFC card
To see the contents of a card we must be in the main menu of the application and click on the "View" entry.
The program will ask us to put the card in the reader to access the information.
We wait a few seconds and it will automatically show us the content that we have stored on the card.
With this tutorial we hope that all those who did not know how to take advantage of the possibility of NFC connections can get a little closer to them and look for new ways to take advantage of these small bytes.