NFC technology is extremely powerful, although it’s still not widely deployed in any area except simple access control and credit card payments. NTAG® 424 DNA tag is a game-changer, because it’s both cheap and intentionally designed for integration with web applications. Here is how the overall process of integration should look like.
Note: NTAG - is a trademark of NXP B.V. This site is not affiliated with NXP.
Design
First of all, you need to think how exactly you are going to use the tags with dynamic URL feature in your project:
- What should happen when the user scans the tag?
- What information is associated with the tag itself?
- How do you ship the tags to the end-users?
After having the most basic questions answered, it’s the time to start implementing the system.
Initialize your tags
Usually, the tags will be delivered to you in a factory-clean state. For that reason, you need to: Program NDEF contents into the tag (for instance: set the URL that will appear after scanning the tag); Protect the tag against modification, so it can not be modified by anyone except you; Change the factory-default authentication keys to some unique value in order to actually protect against tag counterfeiting;
ITSEC R&D company offers a complete software solution for straightforward initialization of the tags. Depending on your needs, you might program the tags using a PC with a card reader or just a smartphone.
Before any software package is provided to you, there is an online meeting aimed at collecting and understanding your particular requirements. Then, we are able to propose the most convenient workflow for the NFC tags and also tailor the software package especially for your project.
Integrate dynamic URL validation into your application
After your tags are provisioned, you need to actually integrate the “dynamic URL” feature into your web application. Here is how this process could look like:
The dynamic URL validation can be performed using our open-source project: icedevml/sdm-backend.
The software package provided by ITSEC R&D contains the commercial version of this project, which is already well-fitted with the rest of components and possibly modified to suit your particular requirements.
Deploy the tags to the end-users
After getting all the software in place and having deployed your web application, your are ready to ship the NFC tags to your end-users!
