NFC Scanner 🔍 for Home Assistant 🏠

About

Imagine that you could start or stop everything with a NFC tag in Home Assistant 😄 Every time you hold an NFC tag against the scanner (and the UID of it is included in the list), there will be send an MQTT message to your broker and eventually to Home Assistant. With a LED you also get physical feedback, that the scanner has actually recognized your Tag. Recently I have added the feature to use Over The Air(OTA) updates, with password protection.

For the NFC scanner I designed a circuit board (PCB) and a 3D printed case.

• In the case folder you will find the required STL files.
• In the pcb folder you can find the Gerber files. Many people let their boards made by Seeedstudio in Shenzhen.
• In the img folder some pictures of the project.

If you have suggestions or questions, open an issue or contribute via a PR!

Schematic

Requirements:

• PN532 NFC RFID (Elechouse module v3) - Banggood or AliExpress
• ESP8266 (NodeMCU v1.0) - Banggood or AliExpress

NFC reader	NodeMCU / ESP8266
SS (CS)	D2 (GPIO4)
SCK	D5 (GPIO14)
MISO	D6 (GPIO12)
MOSI	D7 (GPIO13)
VCC	VCC (3V3)
GND	GND

How to setup

• You need Arduino IDE to configure some files, and use the serial monitor (other IDE's are okey).
• You need the PN532, PubSubClient, SPI and ESP8266WiFi library.

Further down this page you will find all information about which adjustments you have to make.

NFC Tags

At NUM_ACCEPTED_UIDS you indicate how many NFC tags/cards you will use. Then enter the UID values of your NFC tags/cards and give each tag/card its own name. If you are going to make multiple nfc scanners, you can indicate in which room the scanner is present with the LOCATION variable.

#define NUM_ACCEPTED_UIDS 2 //<-----------------CHANGE THIS IF ADDING CARDS!!
NFCTag NFCTags[NUM_ACCEPTED_UIDS] = {
  // It is neccessary to account for UID length since a 7 byte ID could contain a 4 byte ID, which would cause a misfire
 //  #0    #1    #2    #3    #4    #5    #6   #Tagname
  {{0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00}, "Tag1", false, 0, false, {0}},
  {{0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00}, "Tag2", false, 0, false, {0}},
};

// Location of the NFC scanner
#define LOCATION "living_room"

Finding the UIDs

You can find your UID value in different ways, such as via your phone through certain apps from the app / play store. But to make it easy for yourself, it is possible to read only the UID tags / cards, via the same .ino script.

You start this mode by setting readUIDMode to true, in the ha_nfc_scanner.ino file.

// False wil start de main function, True will start the UID read script so you can find out wich UID's your NFC tags have on the serial monitor.
bool readUIDMode = true;

This way the MQTT and WIFI are switched off and you can read your UID values using the serial monitor.

Credentials

Enter the details of your Wi-Fi network and login details of your MQTT client account and the IP address of the MQTT broker. Also provide a hostname and password for the Over The Air(OTA) feature.

// OTAupdate
#define OTA_HOSTNAME      ""
#define OTA_PASSWORD      ""

// Wi-Fi credentials
#define WIFI_SSID         ""
#define WIFI_PASSWORD     ""

// MQTT
#define MQTT_USERNAME     ""
#define MQTT_PASSWORD     ""
#define MQTT_SERVER       ""
#define MQTT_SERVER_PORT  1883

Home Assistant - Binary Sensor

in Home Assistant we can create a binary sensor that will respond when a tag is recognized and is in the UID list.

To retrieve and use the results obtained with the NFC scanner into Home Assistant, please edit and add this snippet into your configuration. Make sure to replace <CHIP_ID, <LOCATION> and <NFC_TAG_NAME> with the values defined in config.h.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
binary_sensor:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: 'NFC Tag 1'
    state_topic: '<CHIP_ID>/sensor/<LOCATION>/<NFC_TAG_NAME>/state'
    availability_topic: '<CHIP_ID>/availability'
  - platform: mqtt
    name: 'NFC Tag 2'
    state_topic: '<CHIP_ID>/sensor/<LOCATION>/<NFC_TAG_NAME>/state'
    availability_topic: '<CHIP_ID>/availability'

PCB Design

Do you live in the Netherlands and you want a PCB? Contact me I have number of PCB's.

Troubleshooting

If you get an error, create then an issue so that I can sort things out for you. Below the solution for errors that I have encountered.

Not Enough Space

If you get the error message [ERROR]: Bad Answer: ERR: ERROR[4]: Not Enough Space, change in the Arduino IDE the Flash Size to 4M (1M SPIFFS).

Credits

A big ⭐ for mertenats, the script of this repo is based on his.

Disclamer

We use aliexpress / banggood affiliate links for the components and the tools. Some Ad-blockers might block these links an thus they seem to appear broken. You will have to temporarely disable ad-blocker to open these links.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019-2022 Klaas Schoute

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.