Near field communication

[Harald Welte]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 07:41:43PM +0100, Bruce Deschamps wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> My name is Bruce, I recently subscribe to the community list and I have been
> reading a few of the very interesting threads you've been talking about. I
> was wondering if  any of you had thought about near field communication
> capabilities like using RFID reader and chips to deal with payment,
> ticketing, infotainment, or entreprise solutions like tracking by using the
> neo1973 and openMoko Framework?

Please note that I as one of the core people behind the software, and
now also Neo1973 hardware, have spent much time over the last years with
the development of projects like

http://openmrtd.org/projects/librfid/
http://openmrtd.org/projects/libmrtd/index.html
http://www.openpcd.org/
http://www.openpcd.org/openpicc.0.html
http://www.openbeacon.org/

So we definitely know about RFID and NFC stuff ;)

> on. I was wondering if there was any possibility to integrate this
> functionnality into our upcoming Neo and openMoko?

For Neo1973: No way.  We are happy to deliver "a very basic smartphone"
from the hardware point of it.  As you have noticed, even something as
simple as that (from the hardware point of view) has caused delays and
delays.

For our 2008 device plans:  We're keeping an eye on it.  For something
ISO14443-1/2/3/4 compliant it would be possible, since that is open
enough.  The other side is the chipset.  I'm currently not aware of any
NFC chipsets that would even allow the driver and other software to be
Free Software.  And that is a sort of a blocker issue for us.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
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