Technical articles

Using SpringCard PC/SC Couplers with a Raspberry Pi 4

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SpringCard PC/SC Couplers like the H663 family (CrazyWriter HSP, Prox’N’Roll HSP, TwistyWriter HSP…) and the new SpringCore family (PUCK…) are well supported by Linux systems thanks the open-source PCSC-Lite stack and its CCID driver. All these devices are easy to operate on early Raspberry Pi with little to no specificities.

This has changed on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspian Bullseye and their new power-saving policy: by default, the system now shuts down any USB device that appears as being “unused” — which is namely the case of any PC/SC Coupler until a card is inserted or presented ;-).

For correct operations of any SpringCard PC/SC Coupler with a Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspian Bullseye, the integrator must therefore disable the USB power control, and this article explains how to do so. It may also be useful to anyone trying to troubleshoot disconnection issues affecting any PC/SC device when used together with an embedded Linux system where USB power saving is enabled by default.

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Using NXP RFIDDiscover with SpringCard PC/SC Couplers

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RFIDDiscover (formerly MifareDiscover) is a GUI software provided by NXP to help the developers explore the features of their contactless cards (Mifare, Desfire, NTAG and ICode) and learn how-to use them from a real application.

This software is available to customers under NDA with NXP, through the DocStore document delivery platform (ref. SW1866).

This article shows how-to get started with this RFIDDiscover, in the aim of using it together with SpringCard devices. This is the preferred method to learn how those cards work, before starting the development of any software that would use them for data storage and/or secure transactions.

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Using NXP Card Test Framework with SpringCard PC/SC Couplers

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Card Test Framework is a GUI software provided by NXP to help the developers explore the features of their contactless cards (Mifare, Desfire, NTAG and ICode) and learn how-to use them from a real application.

This software is available to customers under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with NXP, through the DocStore document delivery platform (ref. SW5434).

This article shows how-to get started with this Card Test Framework, in the aim of using it together with SpringCard devices.

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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