How to - Desktop Mac & PC NFC Tag Reader/Writer

hello guys today we'll be going over the desktop nfc reader writer this allows your desktop computer or laptop to read and write nfc cards um i have a couple cards from tap tag this is their bamboo card it's an nfc business card this is their custom plastic card and then i have a custom engraved metal card as well that i really like and then also just your typical nfc tag also from tap tag but we'll be programming all of these today with a desktop nfc reader and i'm going to show you how to do it quick back history the reason why i'm doing this video is because i bought this thing thinking it would be very self-explanatory when it came in the mail from amazon however it came with a little gamecube little pc disc from 1990 i have all macs they don't have it they haven't had a cd slot in 10 years i was trying to figure out how to use this thing i scoured the internet there's no videos there's no info there's nothing that exists that tells us how to use this so i figured it out and i'm making a video to help you guys to do the same thing because it was a nightmare of an experience overall like i said this is about 50 bucks or so on amazon it has a typical usb cord the old school style so if you have a macbook pro from the last like two or three years that probably has a usbc connector so you're gonna need an adapter of some sort like this one here this is also very cheap on amazon like 15 bucks you just plug it into your usbc and it converts it into usb that's if you have a laptop i still have a mac that still has two of the old-school usb connectors so i am good to go um so we'll get started here you just plug it back right back into your computer you can just throw that disk out if you got the one that comes with the little software disk that that software is garbage for one and two you know who has a cd rom insert anymore the first thing you want to do is you're going to go to just whatever internet explorer you choose to use here and here we go and you're going to go to a site called wac dev i'll put the link in my description here and it's just a nfc tools app and i made another video before about how to program these cards using your smartphone that by downloading an app because your phone has a native nfc reader and writer in it that could program cards if you want to however your computer does not so your computer needs the extra tool to be plugged into it um so this is the same as the app i recommend in the iphone app store in the android app store so you just go to this website and whatever computer you have whether windows intel whatever it may be you choose what type of computer you have and you just download the file it's just like any other program when it comes to this you're just gonna have to open it up it's gonna have like a little download software screen you just click through it hit continue a bunch of times and eventually you'll see it's downloading into your computer and then i have a mac personally i've never used the windows version but i can't imagine it's much different than the version we're gonna go over today which is for mac so i did for intel mac because my mac is before the m1 apple chip came out and if you do have the m1 apple chip which isn't i think 2021 or later uh then then you're gonna do this one but either way you can just do trial and error whatever it works you can just download them both who cares one of them will work so once that is downloaded we'll exit out of this you're going to have this nfc tools desktop icon at the bottom here or it might be in your applications as well you're going to want to click this and it's going to open up this very simple dialogue screen super easy so from there you take one of your nfc cards and if you place it over the reader it's going to beep at you and it's going to tell you everything about that tag a bunch of mumbo jumbo but you could see that this has a record on it which means it's programmed with a website this is programmed with the tap tag website so if we were to do it again this card is programmed with nothing it's not password protected it gives us basic info this is essentially a useless screen you don't really need this for anything it's more just for a learning cause right now if you want to see a couple other things we want to see the memory on it we we tapped the card again it's going to tell us a lot more stuff this is going to be anything that's programmed on to it maybe from the factory maybe from the software it could be could be anything but at this point this is the card that was blank and there's essentially nothing nothing on it once we write something to it you'll see that some things will appear here so if you want to write this nfc tag and i have a very specific video about how to program different things like a contact card or your link tree or anything onto the onto these cards using your phone but we're going to kind of do the same exact thing here on the computer using this bad boy here if you want to write your tag you're going to go to the right option here you'll see that this is blank and this pissed me off originally because i was like i thought you had to program it and then you hit right and then you tap the card because that's what the phone is like when you're doing it on your phone you do everything first and then the last step is to hit right and then you tap the chip and it programs so to do an nfc business card what you're going to want to do is hit add a record you're going to see a ton of options here and a lot of these are very enticing however if you're planning to use this for business card purposes only really one option will work here and we're at the mercy of smartphones for this and let me explain a little bit further smartphones only accept a website link via nfc natively so no app required no nothing required all you do is you take a smartphone and you're gonna tap it to the chip and it'll it'll just work right out of the box without having to do anything really at all the reason why is because it only accepts a website link so if you're looking at this and you're like wow it would be really nice to use you know the contact option on this great app you could program the card with contact info with raw contact info however it's not going to work with smartphone you'll get a successful program and then when you go to tap it it just won't do anything because your phone doesn't know how to convert raw contact data into something that makes sense on your phone um same thing with a bunch of these other ones some of them work on android some of them work on apple but pretty much the only one that works on both of them is the custom url slash uri option this is just a basic website browser link that we all would share with a friend or whatever it may be so in this case we're going to do custom url uri this brings up a tiny little dialog here and in this case we're going to do my link trees so let me just copy my link from my other screen here and this is my link tree so we're telling it what to program onto the card we're going to hit ok and now you can see this pops up right here another important thing before we go forward is although you can program multiple things onto an nfc card like i said before smartphones not only accept a website link but they only accept one single website link so if you think you're going to go on here and program your instagram facebook tick tock whatever it may be all together the card will likely accept it and program onto the card and you'll be able to read it using an app or software but your phone won't do it natively and to give you an extreme example imagine you program 15 different websites onto your card and you go to tap it you don't want your phone blowing up with like 15 notifications think about how your phone would turn that data into something that makes sense it doesn't make sense so it only takes in one single website link so it's important that we just do one the cool thing is with this is a site like linktree i'll bring my other screen over here it consolidates infinite information under your one profile link so if you want to have your website your youtube your instagram facebook it's all consolidated under your one profiling so if you want to bypass this problem and have multiple things on your nfc business card you can do it by using a free site like link tree there's beacons there's contact and bio there's bio.fm there's a ton of them i'll put those in the bio as well this is a way to get the full use out of your card so right now we're going to program this link tree so this card has nothing programmed on it whatsoever so we're going to attach right here you'll see that this right becomes available so if i remove it it goes blank if i add it to the card it says right so now all you do is hit right you're gonna get a successful the card is now written so if you now take this card and tap it to your phone you'll see that notification appear that says open link tree in safari you open it up and it goes right to my my digital business card essentially with all my information so we're gonna do something else this time i'm gonna do a contact card because a lot of people have questions with how do i put my contact card on the thing i want it to look like a business card i don't want this linked tree crap i want somebody to save my contact and phone to the phone no worries at all i have another video about how to make a link like this it's a free site called vcard.link i'll put that video in the bio as well but that's a couple minute video and i'm not going to spend time going over that now essentially it's a free website and you can convert your contact details into a link so what we're going to do here is exit out of that that record that we're programs now it's blank again there's nothing here the card is still programmed but on the software it doesn't have any information so we're going to add a record again and then custom url asking us what we want to add and we're going to add this contact card link like i said we made this in another video and we're gonna hit okay so now we're gonna program this uh the sticky tap tag with that so right now it goes to the tap tag website let's just or no sorry it goes to my instagram right now so you tap it oops tap it and it goes right to my instagram so we're going to change it to go to this contact card so you put the tag on the platform here and you're going to hit right so we're writing this into the tag it's successful so now when i take this tag and i touch my phone to it i get a notification that says open vcard and then we tap it it opens up my native vcard info and then i can just hit create new contact or add to contacts like we would if we were to say text it to each other or whatever it may be and it's it's going to be permanently this vcard.link site so it's going to open up my contact card so super easy to do if you want to edit this link we'll just go over some other little features here if you wanted to edit this for any reason um you could just click this little pencil icon and just you know change it around and hit okay again a note i want to add is if there's a space in here whatsoever it will fail um so sometimes if we're copy pasting from a browser for example um there might be a little bit of a hidden space like right here for example like that and we might not see it when we're pasting it but it'll program you'll get a successful program message however your phone won't read it at all so if you're having a problem where you're able to program the card but your phone's just not picking it up just double check this that there's no space you know before or after the link that you may have accidentally you know highlighted when you're copy pasting it originally to exit out of this link here you just hit the exit thing um a couple other options too if you wanted to erase the tag so say i don't want anything on this tag at all i could just erase it by uh sorry i have to put on the reader first and then i just hit erase and it's going to erase the tag and now when i go to touch it to my phone nothing's going to happen at all because there's essentially nothing on the tag if i wanted to write it again say with my instagram this time i just add a record again custom url and my instagram web url so each it has to have the https too this is another important tip i forgot to mention that earlier um you can't just manually type in www.mywebsite.com it has to be the official https semicolon www.mywebsite.com for this to work properly so we're going to do my instagram and this put that on the thing hit right hit ok and now it should in theory go to my instagram account let's just open it to make sure and there we go there's my instagram that's really it all these cards are exactly the same um it's all the same technology so if you wanted to write my instagram onto the metal card for example we're just gonna put that down and hit right again and then now when we do the metal card it goes to my instagram so super simple you could reprogram these every time you program it it's going to overwrite the previous data so if i were to let's just for example do my link tree again if i wanted to do my link tree i could just hit this hit the edit button and just change this link out and paste my link tree and then now remember we just did instagram on this and when we put this here we hit right again and now what it's doing is it overwrote my instagram with link tree so every time you do repeat this process it's gonna overwrite doesn't add to it it doesn't multiply it it overwrites it um so now when we scan the metal card it's going to go to my link tree there we go instead of the contact card instead of the instagram that's really in if we wanted to find out some more information about the card the nfc tag we go back to the information tab and if we put the metal card on it it'll say at the bottom here that it's going to link tree slash that drone guy tie because that's what we just programmed on and if we did the plastic card put that over it on the information tab it's also going to my link tree and then i think this one was my instagram um yes so the the plastic hat so this is a quick way to see the dad on the card and maybe the factory and phone where it's from um you can see right now it says instagram if we wanted to erase it we can go to other erase and now there's nothing on this tag whatsoever format is essentially the same exact thing as a race format is more of like a factory reset so it's a little bit more intense but it doesn't really do anything this might be for if you're having problems with your chip it's going to reset it back to how it was when it was manufactured when a race might just erase the record that was on it um you could set a password on your nfc chips as well i'm not going to go over that too much but essentially you could type in a password and what this does it's me so say this tag had a restaurant menu on it and it's on it's stuck to a table somewhere um and you want your customers to tap the tag and go to your menu for example but it's in a public space unsupervised for a chunk of the day you don't want some unruly teenagers programming something maybe undesirable on this when you say hey check out our menu and they tap it and now it's going to something crazy so password protecting it you could just put a quick four-digit pin on here so you could just do like you know whatever just any random number you can even do a one digit pin anything i think it goes up to six digits and you'll need to use this password so you'll have to remove so you set password you put this on here you set the password to say five five five and then to remove it it's unprogrammable at that point and then you'll have to put this on the reader and hit remove password type in your password and then now it's programmable again so you're removing the rights to program it essentially and that that's pretty much it you know this this is a great program it's super easy to use it's the same mostly on the phone like i said i'll post my other video in the bio here to go over how to do the same exact thing but with your smartphone so you don't have to waste money on this thing if you don't want to but this is good when you're doing tags in bulk or if you're doing things on your computer screen where you can quickly copy paste from safari or maybe your notepad or whatever an email where if you're on your computer all day that's why i have it because i get a lot of emails with hey program this for me program that for me and i just like to copy it right from my desktop and do it without having to airdrop it to my phone to use this i'm able to just bang through all these like very quickly it's it's super streamline and easy like i said for 50 bucks it's meant for a certain type of person but it's definitely worth it if you're programming and reading nfc cards in bulk if you have any questions please please please put it in the comments um i i love answering questions i do it very quickly um you can see from my other videos all my questions are answered in like less than a day i'm very passionate about helping people out and helping them get by this and the sole reason for this video is because i struggled to figure this out for a solid few hours because it comes with no directions when you buy this it literally comes with this and a cd-rom and i don't even know how to use a cd-rom my little brother who's nine doesn't even know where cd-rom is at this point so it's it's a phasing out technology they need to come up with a new version but this version you know it just works well it's just right out of the box it's just going to work and then you just download this software and you're good to go thank you subscribe if you want to know more about nfc stuff i'll put the link to tap tag as well in the bio so you could check out their products and get some things customized pretty cool stuff and uh we'll talk again thank you so much for watching you

Channel: That Drone Guy Ty

Views: 42,506

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Id: k-M0z15hGRk

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022