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I'm currently working on an IoT project. The principle is to have a box that could connect to a phone over Bluetooth on some NFC contact. After the phone and the box will communicate messages over Bluetooth to the phone.

The box must be able to pair with the phone and when an NFC contact is triggered send a message to the phone using Bluetooth.

I've started by developing a truly basic prototype of it using a raspberry pi and an NFC PN532. I now want to develop a new version of it using some dedicated hardware, the idea is to get as near as possible of an industrial version.

I've seen two different hardware to do so:

My problem is that as I have no experience at all in IoT and I am more of a software engineer than hardware engineer I don't really know which one is the better for my project.

I then have two questions:

  • Do you know any other hardware piece that allows Bluetooth and NFC ?

  • Which one would you advise for me ? How can I truly differentiate them ?

Thx for reading me.

PS: please pardon my English I'm still learning ;)

sob
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Sebz
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2 Answers2

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First draw your block diagram in boxes, and write down your required hardware protocols, e.g., Bluetooth module would need a UART port, NFC would need some other protocol. You will end up with the block with your communication requirements and then you would want to look up the triangle: a) cost, b) time and c) performance. Both the aforementioned microcontrollers in the links scare me because I am relatively weak in programming and I would go with Arduino-based micro's. I would gain in cost and time to develop, but going in more industrial gives a a performance advantage and, of course, expandability for future versions.

dBm
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If you want to choose a micro-controller/Processor for your project, first you should search for its resources and see if there is any library for your use case.

In that point I did a little research for you and I think you can build your project with ESP8266 microcontrollers.

ESP8266 is a microcontroller made by Espressif that was built for IoT projects, it has a lot of documentations and an active community

You can take a look at its features in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266

There is a very simple and powerful Interface for programming these controllers called Arduino (I'm sure you've heard of that): https://www.arduino.cc

And if you want to setup your project with Esp8266 and arduino IDE you should do these steps here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-huzzah-esp8266-breakout/using-arduino-ide

In your case it's good to take a look at this reference: https://github.com/Robotto/ESPnfc

It's a library and project examples for building NFC projects with esp8266

Sina Ronaghi
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