One of the magic things about Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is that the tags don’t need a battery to communicate – you’ll never need to buy a new coin cell battery for your employee badge. , because the badge reader wirelessly transmits enough power to the badge to verify that it is legitimate. Now chipmaker Infineon wants to do the same with smart locks – ones that can be powered entirely by your phone.
You can already buy fancy door locks in Europe and basic padlocks in China that do the trick, with Finland’s iLOQ claiming to be the first to do so in 2016. But today Infineon is selling a new chip and offering full step-by-step instructions (PDF) to anyone who wants to partake in the idea.
It’s called the NAC1080, and it’s designed to be a single chip that does pretty much everything. It has circuitry to recognize your NFC phone, harvest its power, and drive the smart lock motor. And it has both built-in security features and a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 processor to verify that you and your phone are authorized to open and close the lock in question. All of this while running off the small charge your phone can provide.
The manufacturers will have to provide the antenna, the 3V mini-motor and the capacitors which take the place of the battery. Locks like this need to build up a small charge before they can power a motor, but it looks like we’re talking seconds based on the unlock example you can see above.
Don’t necessarily expect this feature to show up in other smart locks, like the deadbolts you typically mount on doors in your home. “The key is the smart design of the mechanical latch that can be opened and closed with very low power consumption,” said Qi Zhu, director of marketing and business development at Infineon. The edge. While Infineon says it could be used in a front door lock and has demonstrated it with a full deadbolt, it admits “response time for more complex doors is longer “. After posting that message, he clarified that Infineon believed it would be possible to open one in about two seconds.
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Infineon’s detailed instructions for designing these locks (pdf) show that the motors are generally meant to turn the “secret” of the lock, not move large parts of the lock itself. In the example of Infineon’s padlock, for example, the lock’s shackle opens after the small piece holding it locked spins out of the way. A video from iLOQ, below, shows the energy moving a pair of tiny pins, with your fingers doing the rest.
Using these locks may also depend on the phone you have. Infineon’s Zhu says consumer mobile phones deliver an average of 20mW in the company’s tests, but NFC field strength depends on your phone’s antenna, lock’s antenna, and proximity with which you can bring them closer when trying to unlock. “All the brands we tested, such as Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, performed very well.”
Regarding locks, Infineon says that “several customers are currently in the design phase, and we expect them to launch new products with our technology in the market early next year.”
Me, I wonder what other kind of gadgets we could design where my phone brings them to life. I’d love to stop replacing button batteries in my kid’s sing-along books, for example, and would totally put my phone on my kitchen scale if he could power it and record its readings (and therefore my calorie intake) at the same time. Infineon also imagines a “passive NFC tire pressure sensor for bicycles”.
Last June, researchers even revealed a prototype NFC-powered pacemaker designed to dissolve into the body after a patient’s heart stabilizes.
Update, 1:48 p.m. ET: Added additional details, including Infineon saying they tried it with a full deadbolt.