Planet Arduino

Don’t you hate having to pull out your wallet or cellphone in order to pay for something? What if you could just wave your hand and transfer money that way? Well [David] did, so he decided to do something about it. He made the vending machine in his hackerspace, FamiLAB, cyborg friendly.

The problem was, the vending machine wasn’t technically his to play around with… so he had to do this hack without actually modifying the machine itself — which we admit, actually makes it quite a bit more interesting!

But first, why is [David] even doing this? Is he a cyborg or something? Well, not quite, but he’s quite enthusiastic about bio-tech (is that what we call it now?) — anyway, he has NFC implants in his hand, and magnets in his fingertips to give him a sixth “electro-sense”. Wanting to take the most advantage of these augmented abilities, he put together this clever NFC credit card emulator.

To read his hand, he’s using an Adafruit RFID/NFC Shield stuck on the front of the machine, with an Arduino Mega 2560 to control it. To get around messing with the credit card unit, he’s placed a solenoid next to it, which is close enough that when energized with his information… the credit card machine reads it. Whether or not you like the cyborg action itself, what [David's] put together is pretty incredible. He has detailed instructions and material on GitHub if you’re interested in knowing more.

Alternatively you could just get an NFC ring… or for the electro-sense, a neodymium ring magnet.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, Microcontrollers

Don Coleman demonstrates using both Adafruit's and Seeed Studio's NFC shields to read Near-Field Communication (NFC) tags.

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