• Registered: 2009-05-14
  • Posts: 1

Topic: PN531x and BenQ T80 compatibility

Hi everyone!

For my internship, I have the possession of two PN53x NFC readers. (NXP PN531 and ACR122) As the BenQ T80 is equipped with a PN532 (SmartMX) chip and supports the Java Contactless Communication API. (JSR-257), I want to make a connection between one of these readers and the mobile phone. I find it hard to find any information about which combination of phone + reader is "the best". That leaves me to choose between one of the following options:

1. BenQ T80 (PN532 SmartMX) + NXP PN531

2. BenQ T80 (PN532 SmartMX) + ACR122 (PN532)

As far as I’ve read from the libnfc homepage, both readers are supported. I’ve tested the libnfc1.00 library with the NXP PN531 on an ubuntu 8.10 box. I want to develop an application which is able to connect the reader to the phone and send data from a Java PC program to the reader. The J2ME application with Contactless Communication API, which is available on the BenQ T80, will convert the received data back to a file.

The thing I‘ve been thinking about is to map the commands from the Java PC program with a JNI interface to a C / C++ program, which uses the libnfc library. Maybe there is another better solution, but this moment, I can’t think of any. As the Contactless Communcation API is mandatory for the phone, the application on the server side has to be adapted. Therefore: Does anyone have a suggestion how to create a connection between the PN53x (option 1 / 2) reader and this phone? smile

Thanks in advance !

  • roel
  • Administrator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2009-02-18
  • Posts: 151

Re: PN531x and BenQ T80 compatibility

Dear jurgen,

Very interesting project you are starting on. Currently I own a BenQ T80 myself. It has a PN532 chip, and therefor should be compatible. There are some JAVA classes available to use, but it does not offer all the features you could do with libnfc. The T80 phone runs on Windows Mobile. There is in the system directory of the phone a (proprietary BenQ made?) nfclib.dll file which makes all the calls to the chip (for the JAVA layer). I quickly looked into the compiled ARM dll to see if I could invoke the features to make it compatible with libnfc. But different research subjects distracted me the last months.

I suggest to try to make a connection to the PN532 chip the same way nfclib.dll does (probably using a UART (RS232-serial) COM interface). If you need any help drop me a line I can give you some interesting files (like a complete dump of the initial BenQ T80 ROM files). When libnfc can work with the chip, it is easy to make a wrapper around the library for usage in JAVA, but this time supporting all the features of libnfc.

Cheers,

  Roel