The Power-Free Tag Emulator

Most of you know how an NFC tag works. The reader creates an RF field that has enough energy to power the electronics in the tag; when the tag wakes up, two-way communication ensues. We’re accustomed to blank tags that can be reprogrammed, and devices like the Flipper Zero that can emulate a tag. In between those two is [MCUer]’s power-free tag emulator, a board which uses NFC receiver hardware to power a small microcontroller that can run emulation code.

The microcontroller in question is the low-power CW32L010 from Wuhan Xinyuan Semiconductor, a Chinese part with an ARM Cortex M0+ on board. Unfortunately, that’s where the interesting news ends, because all we can glean from the GitHub repository is a PCB layout. Not even a circuit diagram, which we hope is an unintended omission rather than deliberate. It does, however, lend itself to the fostering of ideas, because if this designer can’t furnish a schematic, then perhaps you can. It’s not difficult to make an NFC receiver, so perhaps you can hook one up to a microcontroller and be the one who shares the circuit.

12 thoughts on “The Power-Free Tag Emulator

    1. It is an NFC Tag Emulator, so it emulates 13.56MHz tags, not 125KHz ones. The current hardware version is V1.1. I will continue to improve it and release the schematic diagram and Gerber files in due course.
      Please carefully watch the video on GitHub. This video uses the mobile app TagInfo to read the content of the tag. As is well known, mobile phones do not have 125KHz RFID hardware. Therefore, it works at 13.56MHz rather than 125KHz.

        1. The current version only supports simulating one Tag. The next version will add a button and a three-color LED to switch between multiple Tags. Once the firmware for simulating the 14443A Tag is completed, the BOM and Gerber files will be released together.

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