Being recently implanted with a NTAG216 I bought a Dangerous Things KBR1 reader as part of my implant purchase which works great, however I saw a need for having 2 or 3 of these in different locations at work and home etc. and I knew the KBR1 weren’t the cheapest readers on the market, so I started to explore a cheaper readers listed on Amazon that essentially do the same thing: they present themselves as generic keyboards to the computer and then they output the UID as if it were being typed very fast and then hit the return key at the end.
The reader I thought I would try was very cheap (£13 / $17) it also came with 5 cards and 5 keyfobs to experiment with, so a bargain! Link: KKmoon 14443A
When it arrived, before even trying it I thought I would take it apart to inspect its innards and see what kind of antenna array it was using. Deconstructing it on my lunch-break at work I found something very amusing:
Instructions, with a header that reads: Modify Output Format Without Opening Case
Firstly I’ve never really seen instructions written on a PCB before and secondly I found it comical that you could only read these after opening up the case.
The other side:
The label on the underside of the casing reads: M301 - Mifare card Reader - Made in China
The reader reads the fobs and cards that it came with, it also reads some other fobs and cards I got with a cheap RFID-RC522 reader off eBay, however this cheap reader above will not read my NTAG216 nor the NTAG216 stickers which I recently received.
I understood that it might not before ordering, but being 13.56MHz I thought I would take the gamble and would still inevitably use it for learning.
The RC522 reads my NTAG216 chip OK.
I understand that the NTAG216 chips are made by NXP and from what I’ve read on other posts on here the term Mifare is quite generic, but I’m still not sure if Mifare it is inherently incompatible with NTAG216 / NXP range. I have some more docs lined up to read but any pointers gratefully received!
I’m still new to this topic, the more I try to learn the deeper the topic seems to get but I’m doing my best to learn as fast as I can. I don’t have easy access to a Android phone at the moment, I might have to look at getting a second-hand Android unit for as cheap as possible, any recommendations on a old / cheap suitable model of phone to aim for that will have good NFC compatibility?