PN532 RFID NFC breakout with UART, SPI and I2C interface

The PN532 is the most popular NFC chip, and is what is embedded in pretty much every phone or device that does NFC. It can pretty much do it all, such as read and write to tags and cards, communicate with phones (say for payment processing), and ‘act’ like a NFC tag. If you want to do any sort of embedded NFC work, this is the chip you’ll want to use!

NFC (Near Field Communications) is a way for two devices very close to each other to communicate. Sort of like a very short range bluetooth that doesn’t require authentication. It is an extension of RFID, so anything you can do with RFID you can do with NFC. You can do more stuff with NFC as well, such as communicate bi-directionally with cell phones

Because it can read and write tags, you can always just use this for RFID-tag projects.

The PN532 is also very flexible, you can use 3.3V TTL UART at any baud rate, I2C or SPI to communicate with it. This chip is also strongly supported by NFC tools-libnfc, simply plug in an FTDI cable and use the FTDI serial port device to communicate - this lets you do NFC dev using any Linux/Mac/Windows computer!

Library and tutorial can be found on learn.adafruit.com.

We also have shield version for Arduino, check it out here