IPhone iCarte case
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So, the burning questsion of the moment is 'has anyone been lucky enough to test out the iCarte case for iphone?'
They're apparently available as a reader attachment for 3G/3GS and a case for iPhone 4/4s with a case for 5/5s to come shortly.http://chipwave.co/collections/nfc-iphone-cases/products/iphone-4-series-nfc-case
A quick look at appstore shows a lot of banking oriented applications and a couple of possible read/write apps.
Any iPhone devs willing to jump in feet first and see what can be done? -
So, I obtained an iCarte case second hand on ebay or the princely sum of $10 and postage - the lesson learned here is that bank providers will lock the iCartes firmware to a particular iPhone and in some cases to the app as well.
Second hand already activated iCarte is a no on the usability front.If you do buy one, make sure it's never been activated before and locked to the previous users equipment as it appears to be impossible to unlock it.
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For anyone interested, round two of the iCarte adventure appears to be working. You may have to avoid using bank specific apps which may lock the iCarte and limit it's available features.
One of the new iCarte units that I bought unlocked is working quite well reading and writing tags. -
I'm in Australia and have a "spare" iCarte case here which is unfortunately locked via commbank kaching to another phone. We've tried many ways to unlock it but are full of failure. Anyone who would like to have it to play with and possibly attempt to resurrect it is welcome to it if they pay for postage. Message me if interested. (I'll happily send it anywhere in the world, but postage might be evil.)
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Well, it looks like iOS7 changed the way the interface for the iCarte behaves and I can't get it to read any ntag203 at the moment. Being bored I decided to pull it apart to show how the sweet spots correspond to the antenna and how different things can be. The Alpha ring starts a read at the white cross and circle and the Normal ring starts a read at the red bullseye.
If you look at the green circuit board, there are two antennas. One circles the very outside of the board and the other is slightly further in from that. Interestingly the iCarte contains two seperate oscillating circuits at 13.560MHz with one connected to each antenna.
