Place NFC Tags in Your Home to Automate Daily Activities

Everyone loves efficiency: if you can simplify a task, especially a task that you need to do several times a day, your life becomes much easier. NFC tags can help you turn these types of recurring commitments into easy automation, and you don’t need a lot of technical skills to get started. Basically, all you really need is a smartphone and a tag.

What are NFC tags?

NFC tags are stickers with built-in “near field communication” technology. You know NFC from services like Apple Pay or Google Pay: it’s a technology that allows two devices to quickly and instantly communicate with each other. Your smartphone has NFC, as do these tags.

However, unlike POS (point of sale) in a store, NFC tags are a blank slate: you won’t use them to buy a product (although you could probably program it to do so), but you can use NFC tags. do just about anything you can think of using your iPhone or Android, especially automated tasks that can save you time and energy.

For example, this Instagram creator uses an NFC tag to contact her partner whenever one of them feeds the dog. This is a great use case: whenever one of them gives the dog breakfast on the way to a walk, it will scan the NFC tag. This triggers an automation on their iPhone to send a text to another that reads “The dog has been fed.”

Another example is simple Wi-Fi sharing , at least on Android: when someone new comes to your house, instead of pointing them at the sign with information about your Wi-Fi, they can point their smartphone at the label NFC (possibly equipped with Wi-Fi). topic for easy identification) which will automatically connect them to your home internet.

How to set up an NFC tag on your iPhone or Android

Due to the seemingly endless possibilities of NFC tags, there is no one-size-fits-all guide to setting up NFC tags. If you have a specific task in mind, you need to do some research to determine the exact steps to make it work. However, there are some universal aspects to using NFC tags in general, so we’ll get started.

First, you need to buy NFC tags! A quick search on Amazon brings up a huge list of results, but this set will help . NFC tags are also relatively inexpensive, so they are often sold in large quantities for 30 to 40 cents per tag.

Once you have the tags, it’s time to code! If you have an iPhone, you can use the Shortcuts app to create an automation for your NFC tag. To access the NFC editor, open the app, tap Automation at the bottom of the screen, select Create Personal Automation, then tap NFC. From here, scan your NFC tag, give it a name when connected, then click next.

If you’re using Android, you’ll need a third-party solution like NFC Tools to get started. Fortunately, NFC Tools is almost ready to use after installation, so no preparation is required.

At this point, you are completely free to work with NFC shortcuts or tools on your own to make your NFC tag do whatever you want. Simple actions are easy to program as each application has obvious use cases. NFC tools, for example, have a list of different actions you can choose from, while shortcuts offer several and the rest offer via the Add Action button. However, for more complex actions, you will probably need to find a manual, as you can string together complex and powerful automations that won’t be as obvious to beginners.

But let’s look at something simpler: set up an automation to send a text message, like in the example from this Instagram feed. On the iPhone, we can see exactly how this creator set it up: after you’ve scanned the NFC tag in the shortcuts, choose “Send Message” as the action, then click “Message” and enter the text you want to send. Then click “Recipients”, then choose who you want to send the message to. Select “Next”, then turn off “Ask before launch” to make sure the text is sent as soon as the tag is scanned. If you want to know that the automation is working correctly, you can select “Notify at startup”. Then click “Done” and your tag is set!

It’s also easy to set up in NFC Tools. Launch the app, select “SMS”, then tap the person and arrow icon to select the contact you want to send a message to. Enter your message in the text field below this field, then click OK. Now click “Write” and scan the NFC tag.