Arduino and adafruit PN532 RFID/NFC Shield

I had an Arduino Uno and a NFC shield lying around (who hasn’t?) and I thought it would be a cool idea to try and set up a very primitive time registration thingy combining these two and Dynamics 365.

This is very primitive and there are so much more possibilities I would like to try out in the future e.g. combination with Azure IoT, usage of Field services, …

To set up the PN532 RFID/NFC Shield in combination with your Arduino, some soldering is required but I won’t cover that in this post. Since I haven’t got an Ethernet breakout board (yet) all communication has to pass via the Serial port of my laptop. I wrote some data to the card so it contains an identifier that shows it’s my card and so it can be linked in Dynamics 365 to my contact record.

Furthermore I wrote a listener on the COMI port that reads every 5 seconds. If you don’t set a wait after an entry you will be flooded with entries since one swipe can trigger 6 entries. When the card is swiped across the RFID/NFC shield this console app Upserts a record to my contact record with the time of swipe.

More on the subject will follow.