NFC Ring Control App fails to write to tag
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For some reason my copy of the NFC Ring Control app v0.1.6 (beta) always fails to write anything to an inlay. My phone will "beep" indicating that it's accessing a NFC tag, but then the app will freeze. I have to forcefully kill the app to get out of it.
This happens regardless of which "Create" suboption I select, like Twitter, Text or Facebook. Reading the tag comes up empty, leaving me to believe that the app didn't write anything to the tag.
I've uninstalled and re-installed the app a couple of times, to make sure that library corruption wasn't happening.
That said, the NFC Unlock app works perfectly fine for me. I'm able to set the UnlockApp to use both inlays in the ring and even both spare inlays packaged with the ring.
Any ideas why the Control app freezes up when I'm trying to write to it?
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Thought I would add some strange behaviour I noticed:
- I can write extremely short text strings to it. Something like "hello world" or "foo" gets saved. But say something like "NFC Control App NFC Contol App" doesn't. I know that there's a maxlimit to the length of the string that can be written (something like 168b?) but even something shorter than 50 chars should be safe I would think?
Likewise I am able to save a short URL such as "google.com", but something longer like a "youtube.com/watch?v=12345abcdefg&t=1m10s" URL doesn't work.
Faulty app or perhaps bad ring inlay?
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the second one could be because the ring has only 144 bytes
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132 once it's formatted. It's not a lot, so maybe a url shortener would be the go.
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Have never seen the app freeze on a read/write event. Something sounds nasty here.
What phone/OS?
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RE Long strings, whoa that is crazy weird.. Can you write those long strings to the spare inlays we sent you?
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@Lafunamor @Lokki Yeah I thought it was because of the limited memory space, and I figure that a string that's shorter than 50 chars would also be shorter than 132 bytes (assuming standard 1 char = 1 byte).
A URL like the Youtube one I posted was also freezing on me and that URL string length is only 40 chars so ~40 bytes.
@johnyma22 I'm using a Galaxy S3, rooted and custom ROM (PACman running on 4.4.2). I'm assuming that this might be something unique to my phone, as I haven't seen anyone else complain about this same issue here or on the Kickstarter Comments page. I'll try this again later on the extra inlays (at work right now), and also with my spare Nexus S. See if this is a problem only with my phone.
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Yep, your Custom ROM prolly has incompatible NFC libraries.
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@johnyma22 said:
Yep, your Custom ROM prolly has incompatible NFC libraries.
Is there a list of which libraries are known to work, or perhaps are required to work?
Just as a test yesterday, I used another NFC app to send text to my tablet PC. The tablet was able to read the text "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." that I sent from phone to PC. So I don't know if this is an OS software issue (e.g. library in ROM is inadequate/unavailable) vs app software issue (e.g. app isn't reading the library).
The Android app I used to test the sending of text was NFC TagControl (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tagcontrol)
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OK following up on this. Because I'm using nightly builds on my ROM, I went back to the last stable one, on Android 4.3. Things worked better. So I cherry picked a nightly release from April 10, 2014, and this build seems to work just as well for me as the older stable 4.3 release did. All tests below are on PACman 4.4.2 build April 10, 2014. Now I can reliably read/write to all 4 inlays, still with some strange issues.
Here are some things that I tried on my Galaxy S3 phone:
- Creating a text tag "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." works just fine. I get the little pop up indicating that it worked, and reading it confirms that.
- Creating a text tag "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." works fine.This works on all 4 inlays.
- Creating a text tag "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." fails to write. I will hear the double beep tone indicating that it successfully accessed a NFC tag, but then the app freezes. This happens consecutively with multiple attempts on all 4 inlays.
- Creating a text tag "0123456789012345678901234567890123456789" actually fails to write.
- Creating a text tag "012345678901234567890123456789" fails.
- Creating a text tag "01234567890123456789" reads/write fine.
All Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and URL tags work. Long URL tags also fail, seems to also be a limitation of the memory size (which is expected).
What's irking me is that a string of 30 consecutive digits fails, but a string of 90 characters (letters and spaces) can be saved? Is this a bug with the application or maybe the tag?
I'm going to try and install the non-beta 0.1 version and see if this same issue with long digits happens.
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@asbath said:
- Creating a text tag "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." works just fine. I get the little pop up indicating that it worked, and reading it confirms that.
- Creating a text tag "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." works fine.This works on all 4 inlays.
- Creating a text tag "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." fails to write. I will hear the double beep tone indicating that it successfully accessed a NFC tag, but then the app freezes. This happens consecutively with multiple attempts on all 4 inlays.
- Creating a text tag "0123456789012345678901234567890123456789" actually fails to write.
- Creating a text tag "012345678901234567890123456789" fails.
- Creating a text tag "01234567890123456789" reads/write fine.
Hi @asbath , the first fox is 51 bytes, second is 96 bytes and third is failing at 141 bytes because your usable space is 137 bytes. So that's all normal there.
The third fox string also fails to write in the NFC Control App, but I was expecting this as it's oversized.
Your 01234567890123456789 is 27 bytes, second version is 37 bytes and works for me in NXP Tagwriter, first version is 47 bytes and also works fine for me in tagwriter.
The number strings failed for me in the NFC Control App, the writer application just stopped working.
