Using the Payments Ring in day to day use.
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so whilst I don't use this ring every day (because it doesn't open doors) I have now had plenty of experience with it. Its fantastic to wear to the beach for example, because you can buy stuff and not be carrying about a wallet which can easily be stolen if left at the beach whilst your swimming.
In day to day use I have noticed the following.
1- It generally works well.
2- Its always a conversation
3- sometimes people think you are hacking them.
4- older readers or readers that are very scratched up, like touristy areas, near the beach often don't read well. I have had to take the ring off and place it on a reader once, to get it to read.
5- if it doesn't work first go it usually takes 3 (weird I know)
6- when it works first go, you completely own it and it feels cool. Its not so cool when it takes 3 goes. -
Hey @jasok2 thanks for taking your time and sharing this.
Agreed if it opened Samsung doors like the OPN et al then it would be great. It does work with some door locks and we have some partnerships where we're extending that but it's still annoying that Samsung don't seem to want to support the full NFC stack ;( We have reached out on several occasions but made very little progress!
- Awesome!
- Hah yeah, thankfully I tend to go to the same places and after the first few times the novelty wears off for the cashier! I'm not one for lots of small talk so I actually found this a little annoying but now I have a copy/paste response when I get a "wow omg what is that?" type question! What's even more weird is seeing some completely random guy using your technology to pay and how they explain it to cashiers (which is obviously pretty different form me)!
- Haha yea, it's actually kinda weird how cashiers/merchants know some little about the hardware used to interface between a card and their customer. As soon as you go slightly off piste with a use case they aren't comfortable. Payment Schemes are trying to educate people especially around contactless and we will see this get better over the coming years.
- Yea that's when readers go faulty I'm afraid, not much we can do about that ;( You might also find readers which are in non EMV compliant environments such as in big metal boxes in car parks (#1 culprit) will fail consistently. This is purely due to poor engineering implementation.
- There is a specific model of reader that looks like it causes/creates a debounce situation, we know about the engineering problem and it's been solved by a specific manufacturer a few years back so as new terminals roll out this wont be a problem. More on this below..
- Yea, see #5..
More on 5 & 6 from the engineering side..
Disclaimer: Massively oversimplifying things..
The way the chip in the ring works is it ramps up power consumption from the magnetic field (inductive coupling) and then "attempts the transaction"..
The reader recognizes the ring in field, powers it up, the reader then requests the authorization for the transaction and this causes the ring to attempt to pull additional power from the field which unfortunately on those terminals is unavailable. So the ring at this point does a kind of "brown out" which causes a "debounce" type scenario where the reader will display something like "only present one card" or "multiple cards present", this is because the chip/IC in the ring essentially went back to step 0 where the reader wanted to be at step 3/4.
The fix put in place a while back by the reader company was to increase power available in the field after ring is detected prior to the transaction.. Obvious really but it was in line with the EMV requirements of supporting wearables at range across terminals.. It causes the terminal to use a tiny amount of additional power for the duration of the transaction but that's it.
Being on the bleeding edge has it's costs but we're all working hard to improve the infrastructure and the devices :)
So to improve #5 & #6 we just have to sit tight I'm afraid and wait for those terminals to be phased out.
@jasok2 if you can let me know the error you get when you try #5 I can validate my above assumption!
Thanks again for taking your time and supporting our work :)
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@johnyma22 I will keep an eye out in future for the errors in regards to #5. As for door locks can you let the community know which door locks work with the payments ring and update this thread please ?
https://forum.nfcring.com/topic/903/door-locks-that-work-with-the-payment-ring
Cheers :)