Technical articles

Using NXP TapLinx SDK with SpringCard PC/SC couplers

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NXP TapLinx SDK (formerly Mifare SDK) is an high-level sofware library provided by NXP to work with their Mifare, Desfire, NTAG and ICode products.

Written in Java, the TapLinx library has been initially developed for Android, running over Android’s NfcAdapter object to communicate with the contactless cards or NFC tags through the tablet’s or smartphone’s integrated NFC interface.

Recently, the library has been ported to the standard JDK, making it usable in any Java desktop applications thanks to the JRE available on Windows, macOs, Linux, and more. In desktop applications, the TapLinx library relies on the system’s PC/SC stack (javax.smartcardio API in Java) to access the contactless cards or NFC tags through a standard-compliant PC/SC coupler.

This makes TapLinx an interesting solution for developers of desktop applications that have to process NXP cards or tags. This article shows how-to get started with this SDK, in the aim of using it together with SpringCard devices.

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PC/SC on Linux and Mac OS X with Mono

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One the goals of the Mono project is to make Microsoft .NET applications runnable on Unix systems. Using Mono, it is therefore now possible to maintain a single C#/.NET code base, that runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

In this context, SpringCard’s PC/SC SDK (https://www.springcard.com/en/download/find/file/pcsc-sdk) has been updated, so that it now enables developers to write PC/SC applications in C#/.NET, that can execute on Windows, as well as on Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

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SpringCard PC/SC solution for Android has been released

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SpringCard R&D team is proud to release a simple software solution to add support for SpringCard USB PC/SC Couplers to Android tablets (or smartphone). The software is made of two parts: SpringCard PC/SC Service for Android, a freeware application that installs directly from Google Play SpringCard PC/SC Library for Android, an open-source library that makes … Read more

scpcsc_feed completes MultiConf

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scpcsc_feed is a command-line utility for Windows which is a companion-tool for MultiConf in case you need to configure numerous SpringCard PC/SC couplers in batch mode, or change the settings quickly without a needing a full-featured GUI. scpcsc_feed is available at https://files.springcard.com/pub/scpcsc_cfg.zip. Just unzip the archive in the folder you want, and open a command … Read more

New firmware for all SpringCard PC/SC couplers based on the H663 core

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SpringCard has just released a new firmware version, tagged 2.00, for its H663 core. The H663 core is a versatile contactless+contact module, which supports virtually all proximity/RFID HF chip cards (ISO 14443 & ISO 15693 standards, including Mifare, Calypso, etc), NFC-enabled mobile phones or other objects (ISO 18092, peer-to-peer in initiator mode, passive communication scheme), … Read more

Using Mifare Classic EV1 with SpringCard PC/SC readers

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NXP has recently started shipping a new generation of Mifare Classic chips, called Mifare Classic EV1 (part numbers MF1S50yyX/V1 for Mifare Classic EV1 1K and MF1S70yyX/V1 for Mifare Classic EV1 4K). The chips are 100% compliant with earlier Mifare Classic 1K and 4K, with 2 subtle differences: the kind of protocol-level ID to be used … Read more