Can Your Android's Compass Be Used to Receive Data?

NFC is "the next big thing" and you're probably sick of hearing about it because, unless you have a Nexus S, you probably don't have any NFC bells and whistles. 

But we're Android users, a little thing like missing hardware isn't enough to stop people like us! So what can we do? One guy decided to rework his electronic compass into a low-bandwidth, read-only, "poor man's NFC". It's not really NFC, it's simply an Arduino microcontroller, a bit of custom code to drive the Arduino and a custom app on the Android to read the data. That said, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to imagine an NFC reader that transmitted the read data to the Android using a method similar to this. 

Useful? Probably not. Fun? Absolutely! 




Source: Joe Desbonnet's web log