nfc – John McLear

Detecting PN532 NFC Reader Availability on ESPHome devices

Posted on November 26, 2024 by John McLear

I had a PN532 NFC Reader device on an ESP32 running ESPHome and wanted a way to notify Home Assistant if the Reader became unavailable (and therefore stop functioning).

Always use legit Elechouse PN532 devices, most online stores are selling counterfeits that fail to perform.

Place the following blob in your ESPHome Device Config.

binary_sensor:
  - platform: template
    name: "NFC Reader Availability"
    lambda: |-
      if (id(my_pn532).status_has_warning()) {
        return false;
      } else {
        return true;
      }

The entity will appear in Home Assistant as “NFC Reader Availability” under the ESPHome Device.

3 reasons I can’t use the Jolla handset

Posted on January 14, 2014 by John McLear

Email slowness

Exchange Emails are horribly slow to come through, emails don’t update in general (after delete event etc.). I recieve/send thousands of emails each day so when this feature is lacking I’m really scuppered. Why no button to SEND emails when composing? This seems like a no brainer.. A task I do many times a day now takes at least 5 times longer, there is no sense in this.. This should be fixed in a software update and maybe it’s being worked on right now, I really hope so…

No NFC Support

Despite the Jolla rocking an NFC chip for some reason you can’t get any NFC functionality, this seems somewhat insane and I hope it’s fixed in a future update. If it is, please comment 🙂

UX overly focused on swipe gestures

The trend away from buttons and towards UI is really bad. The UX is confusing and feels fragmented, it’s not as if the UI is cluttered neither, it just feels like you do it their way or no way at all.. They should check out Tinder as a good UX reference. The simple and right solution here is to introduce buttons aswell as swipe gestures like y’know, every other frigging phone.

Summary

Overall the handset feels okay, I’m pleased it’s built by a European company and that it should serve as a competitor to the US giants but until the 3 key issues above are resolved I can’t use it as a daily driver so I’m switching back to my Huawei (Android). I tried to use it for ~24 hours, probably not long enough to really get used to the UX, I didn’t find anything “nice”, it all felt a bit dissapointing for the price point but I’m not writing Jolla off. The brand and image is strong, the hardware is sturdy, would I recommend it to consumers right now? No. Would I recommend it to developers? No. So who is this phone for? It’s for advocates of open source and believers that we need a numbers of suppliers in the phone market so we don’t fall into the Microsoft style monopoly that we had on the desktops..

Watch out for Google people, they are gonna fsk your shit up.

After a year of hard work my kickstarter is live!

Posted on July 20, 2013July 20, 2013 by John McLear

And with a £20 offer for early birds you would be insane not to buy an NFC Ring!

Many of you will have seen me with various weird looking prototypes on my finger over the last year and a lot of you probably thought I had reached the point of insanity way before my time, there were moments when I questioned this myself.. Probably the scariest moment was when I stepped down as the Managing Director of Primary Technology and invested most of my savings into a product that has never been proven and at that point I had only researched for a few months.

Why Kickstarter?

Once we started doing advertising (before kickstarter) we had 2 offers to capital fund the project.

One we had approached directly and we knew before the project started he was the guy we wanted on board so a flight over to SF, a calligrapher written letter and several dozen emails later and we had funding, more than we needed actually which gave us some additional marketing funds. Getting this funding was just the bump we needed. Anyway I basically sold 16% of the company for our funds, I’d of given a higher % probably mostly because the person involved is a good person and has the right mentality when it comes to the tech industry.

The other offer was a little less desirable and came after we secured more than enough funding, so that begs the question.. Why sacrifice 10% of the budget to kickstarter when we could have just launched directly? Kickstarter to me is more about building communities than it is raising cash, it’s also about validating products. Both of these things are key, without them the Ring is nothing, so the Kickstarter was right, VC funding is also nice and to be honest without the VC funding to help pay for prototype and testing we wouldn’t have been able to Kickstart.

Stepping into the unknown

NFC Rings aren’t like a normal product.. There is absolutely no way I can/could tell if people wanted function and form in jewelry, the only thing I could find that was a similar movement was the move from bracelets/bands to wrist watches.. There is a huge risk the NFC Ring is way ahead of it’s time and that my product might not be the one that proves to be widely adopted but I do feel that having technology embedded into a ring is the right thing to do.

Going for broke

My overall investment in this product is enough to make my eyes water so I don’t want to go too much into finances but safe to say it’s been close and only actually doable thanks to loans from schools (3d printer), investors (audrey) and the people I have worked with (Tanya, Chris B, Gareth, Don C, Filmaj, Chris & Rich, Tom, Chris (Yuan), Mark, Zero, William, Adam S).. A lot of people have put a lot of hard work into this project and most of the time on a relatively tight budget for what we have accomplished, they deserve a lot of gratitude and credit.

What happens during the campaign?

During the kickstart campaign we will be working hard trying to build up support, funding and also adding final touches such as deciding with the community on the look of the kickstarter exclusive limited edition ring.. we expect a lot of questions

So what’s next for John?

Well assuming we hit our targets we have stretch goals for up to about £300k then after that we’re into the unknown and probably into rounds of funding, I hope we don’t go that far actually because I’d like to have some breathing time for the community to speak their mind and get involved in the project.. Tanya will be leading the project as she has a real solid understanding of our goals and a good mentality to continue growth..

Buy an NFC Ring, they are frigging awesome!