If you haven’t heard of the flexUG4, it’s a Ultimate Gen4 magic transponder on a newly redesigned flex antenna. The UG4 is capable of emulating quite a few varieties of 14443a transponders including MIFARE Classic (4 and 7-byte UIDs), Type 4 NTAGs, and some other ultralight transponders.
I am stoked to see that my love for the UMC that lead to the first UG4, has inspired so many others. Every time I hear about someone getting the UG4 my heart fills up a bit more. At DC and around the various discord servers I frequent I have met so many other people who love this chip as much as I do.
Thanks to DT for originally agreeing to take on the commission for custom work, and for ensuring so many others have gotten use and enjoyment out of the UG4.
It’s impossible to keep on top of every development out there in the world, so it’s critical that adventurous customers like yourself bring these things to our attention!
Tuning pure and simple. The old flexUG4 antennas were re-used antennas we had in stock for another chip type, but the tuning wasn’t perfect. Still it worked, so we produced flexUG4 using it. The problem was that the antennas all have tolerance issues that change the tuning slightly, and the chips also have their own capacitances, with tolerances issues that change the tuning slightly. Since the antenna was already functioning right on the edge of acceptable, we were getting matchups of chip and antenna variances that would throw the performance into the gutter on about 65% of chip+antenna parts we created.. not acceptable.
So we invested the time and money into developing a specific antenna tuned just for the UMC, and performance is great across every combination of inductance + capacitance variance we’ve encountered so far.
Nope. We’d have to waste a chip to make a shitty version for the comparison. But there is this photo of the new one in testing. I got similar range on the ones we assembled today.
