I am going to demonstrate how to use PN7120/ with NTAG215 in this blog.
I ordered NTAG215 chips from eBay and received them this week. It is time to set up the hardware on my bench now. I followed the instructions (Ref[4])from NXP community to setup the platform PN7210 controller on a Raspberry Pi 3B as below:
Step #01: Setup Rasbian and I2C port on Raspberry Pi 3B. If you are very familiar with Rasbian, please skip this step
a. Visiting Rasberry Pi OS website: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/
Download Raspberry Pi Imager for Windows 10: I downloaded imager_1.7.3.exe.
After I installed imager_1.7.3.exe, I selected Raspberry Pi OS(32-bit) and SDHC card to generate a Rasbian SD card.
It takes about 5 minutes to create a Rasbian SD card.
b. Install Rasbian from the SD card
Run “sudo raspi-config” and select “3 Interface Options” as below:
The snapshot telling me that my Raspberry Pi hardware version is Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus Rev1.3.
Then select “I5 I2C …”
Select “Yes” from this pop-up menu to confirm that I2C interface on Raspberry Pi is populated.
After selecting I2C interface, use right arrow to select <Finish> button. Finally reboot Raspberry Pi.
Verify I2C interface from Raspbian OS with the command
$ ls /dev/*i2c*
Step #02: Running out-of-box PN7120 applications
a. Install tools for PN7210 driver on Raspberry Pi
$ sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool git
b. Clone NXP PN7120 from NXP Github
$ git clone https://github.com/NXPNFCLinux/linux_libnfc-nci.git
c. Configure the library
$ cd linux_libnfc-nci
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure –enable-alt
d. Build and install the library
Execute the commands (take up to 5 minutes to build libraries)
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
Step #03: Testing eBay NTAG215 chips
Run demo application in poll mode executing the command:
$ nfcDemoApp poll
It looks the PN7120 controller working as expected on Raspberry Pi platform now. My next step is to use Python to call NXP PN7210 driver which will pave the path for building PiBook Tracker software frame work.
Appendix #01: NTAG215 NFC PVB Coins Chip from eBay:
Ref[3]: https://www.nxp.com/design/training/nfc-use-cases:TIP-NFC-USE-CASES