Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

I'll go right ahead and admit that I was wrong on this one. Really does look like it's full on NFC only with no bluetooth.

Wow. Cool.


But still it's proprietary since there's no open or established protocol for this type of peripheral device input.

What does that mean to us? Simple:

It means that this devices requires a hardware specific closed source binary drivers to function since no open protocol could be used by a third party to develop for us.

That means no automatic inclusion in the kernel, and no third parties writing a driver or app to make this work on platforms not directly supported by the keyboard maker.

That equals a bunch of sad N9 owners. :(

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

If you read the email they sent, they have said this will be made to work for the N9.

Meaning they are creating a method of this working on our N9's :)

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

When first time use press the "driver install key" on the keyboard and the driver is - of course - installed on your phone.

It's Only NFC (But I Like It)!

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

Well, NFC is not some emulation of serial device or such, so "transmit arbitrary data" is slightly incorrect. Also there is a specialized NFC chip in compatible devices, which strictly follows the specification, and that specification does not support HID. Which means that keyboard/drivers in quesion should follow the same specification, i.e. RFID tag reading/writing and HID emulation.

You are most probably right that keyboard emulation is done by polling, can't imagine how that would affect battery life.

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

nobody actually needs HID for this. It would be nice of course, no driver messing and such, but if they provide a driver, that is enough for most people.

NFC can transmit arbitrary data in a way of bulk transmit. this is kind of like USB, which has a very strict protocol (which does NOT include device specifications such as HID, but doess include endpoints of communication and communicaton specs), and can transmit data via bulk. so, if there is a program at the device (== driver) which recognises the keyboard (e.g. by some kind of nfc id? i dunno, in USB world it is Vendor ID and Device ID), and somehow manages to read the communcation (probably via polling, as said), it will work with nfc only.

....would be interesting to use a "normal" nfc tag reader before installing the driver. i guess (!) that it would read another "tag" everytime you push a button on the keyboard.

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

Does anyone know if the N9 supports NFC P2P mode? If not, that keyboard is never going to work with it.

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

Yeah, I was thinking the same, that way you don't need messing up with lower-level protocols. But it will mean polling lots of times per second, a battery killer.

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

I think as for battery life, the device can simply initiate the NFC Tap To Connect we are all familiar with, and then simply poll at intervals :)

Then have a time that if there is no data transmitted our N9's will stop polling until there is another NFC Tap To Connect initiation :)

Let me know if this hasn;t been explained well :P

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

As mentioned earlier in the thread, it most likely doesn't use any open standards.
That doesn't mean it's never going to work....

Re: One 2 Touch NFC keyboard
 

Yes, N9 does support LLCP (both connectionless and connection-oriented); application developers can use the Qt Mobility API to create LLCP servers and clients.

There is no restriction to how much data you can transfer over LLCP; as long as you keep the two devices together data can flow between the two. For a keyboard you'd need an app to convert from data coming over LLCP to keyboard events at some suitable level (X? kernel? something else? dunno)

For anyone interested in LLCP, have a look at the NFC Forum LLCP and NFC-DEP specs, as well as the Qt Mobility NFC API LLCP socket documentation.

However, LLCP is just a communication protocol -- from an application point of view "LLCP support" is about the same as saying that N9 supports TCP and UDP -- necessary but useless by itself. You have to have some application protcol talking on top of LLCP to get any use out of it.

There's also the issue of latency. The LLCP p2p operation is asymmetric, one device is a master while the other one is a slave, and the slave cannot send data except as a response to a PDU from the master. For the cases where the master doesn't have anything to send it sends empty frames to which the slave can reply with data, but I can't now recall what is the default interval for N9 implementation. (it is trivial to make a LLCP "ping" application and I have made one in the past, but I don't currently have two devices so I can't make any measurements now). Dunno what kind of latencies would make keyboard use irritating, but I guess we're talking a couple hundred milliseconds at most.

I won't comment on the battery claims, because I don't have any real understanding on the radio side of matters. NFC tags work only on the current induced from the active device's signal, but I can't say if it would be possible to make a p2p device acting always in the target (slave) role without a power source. I'll leave that to someone else :)