Anyone here using NFC tags for identification of large numbers of manufactured parts?
Or to store whatever data with the part?
No, but I’ve used passive, writable RFID-NFC tags with an ESP32 for some home automation projects (unrelated to Rhino or Grasshopper).
Exactly, you can pretty much save any data you want to the tag as long as it is not read-only and it fits on the EEPROM chip. The ones I have have 1 KBs of “storage”. There are even smaller or bigger variants. For manufacturing, I imagine you’d look for the sticker format, which usually supports way less data (a couple of bytes) and is less expensive than the coin ones I use. They are generally speaking not that cheap though, especially for big volumes, at least for personal projects. I imagine you could buy them in bulk for cheap in China though.
Thanks for the reply.
I saw a showcase some time ago where they linked plans and documents online with wooden parts. I think the part only had a URL inside a small chip. Not visible from the outside, probably a hole in the backside.
OK, that would probably be pretty easy to do! As long as the wood is not too thick I imagine you could even laminate/embed the tag inside with no outside access at all. The important part is that the magnetic field generated by the reader/writer can penetrate through the material to activate/power the tag (for reading and writing). As long as there’s no Faraday cage around the tag, you should be fine.
NFC (near-field communication) tags are cheap ($0.1 for one tag if you buy large number of them), but they work at a maximum range of about decimeter. Their range is too short for RFID-style inventory tracking. To write a tag you need a smartphone and tag writing program, for example, NFC TagWriter by NXP: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nxp.nfc.tagwriter