A truly multi-platform project made up of a hardware element, a mobile phone app and a Java Tomcat based web application. The details of this project are currently part of a non-disclosure agreement but I have been allowed to publish an overview.
Although I have been working on this project as the sole developer it has been a huge amount of fun because of the diversity of the platforms involved. So let’s take a look:
The Tag
The hardware element or ‘the tag’ is a PIC micro-controller connected via SPI to an NXP NFC (Near Field Communications) chip which also powers the tag via RF energy harvesting. The code on the PIC is written in C (using MPLAB X) and interfaces to a mobile phone app via NFC.
The Mobile App
Written in C++ using the Qt Framework. The mobile app uses the NFC APIs of iOS and Android to communicate with the tag and has an optional camera-based alternate option to read barcodes or QR codes printed on the tags. It then communicates with the server via a RESTful API.
The Web App
Based on Apache Tomcat the web application is a typical mixture of Java Servlets and JSP backed on to a MySQL database that synchronises with the subscribed clients. It communicates with the mobile app in JSON format over a REST API.