Make your home smart for 10 euros via nfc stickers
Expanding your smart home can be an expensive joke, but not if you use nfc stickers. With this you make your house smarter than ever for about ten euros.
Read on after the ad.
Making the house smart with nfc stickers: that’s how it works
The smart home is an expensive hobby. Once you get started, you want more and more smart and safe devices in your home and that quickly starts to cost a lot of money. Fortunately, there is also a way to make your home smart on a small budget. For a tenner you are ready and you can perform all kinds of useful actions throughout the house. All you need is a stack of NFC stickers.
What are NFC stickers?
NFC is technology for contactless communication between a passive tag and the active reader. You see it almost every day. It is used to pay wirelessly with a debit card or your iPhone, when you hold an OV chip card against the machine in the bus and when you scan a passport to activate your DigiD.
A major advantage of NFC tags is that they are very cheap and do not require power in the form of a battery. The reader of the chip provides the energy. The chip itself can therefore be incorporated into a flat sticker. If you look around a bit, you can find these stickers for about a euro each or much cheaper. So for ten euros you can buy ten stickers. There are dozens of providers, and it doesn’t matter which one you choose – it’s such a basic technique that they all work. So look for yourself on Bol.com.
How do you set up nfc stickers?
You use these stickers in combination with the Assignments app on your iPhone. With this app you can perform all kinds of tasks, automatically or after a command. The Assignments app can also read NFC tags. To do this, go through the following steps while holding an NFC sticker nearby:
- Open the Assignments app.
- Tap the “Automation” tab.
- Tap the plus sign, then tap “Personal automations.”
- Look for “NFC” in the list.
- Next to ‘NFC Tag’, tap the ‘Scan’ button.
- Hold the top of your iPhone near the NFC tag.
- Give the tag a custom name.
- Then tap on ‘Add task’.
What kind of tasks can I attach to such an NFC tag?
Your iPhone has all kinds of tasks ready for you to choose from. For example, send a message to someone, turn on an alarm or turn on a specific playlist.
Nowadays, more and more physical buttons are being sold for smart lamps, but such a button can also be replaced very well with an NFC sticker. Connect the task ‘all lights off’ or ‘all lights on’ to a sticker and you have a button for your smart lights for less than a euro.
This is how you use Siri or the Google Assistant
You can link any command you can say to a smart assistant to an NFC sticker. As soon as you say a command to Siri, that command is automatically listed among the tasks that you can connect to an NFC tag. Sometimes the Google Assistant works just a bit better and it works the same way.
For example, Spotify is not among the apps that the Commands app supports, but you can ask Siri or the Google Assistant to start a specific playlist and link that command to the NFC tag. For example, every morning I start the ‘Your Daily’ playlist on Spotify by holding my iPhone against a sticker.
How do I use the NFC sticker?
To use an NFC sticker, all you have to do is hold the top of your phone against it. Your device must be unlocked.
Please note: Only you can use that nfc sticker, because the task is set on your smartphone. Others in your household must create an Assignment for each NFC sticker.
Nice ideas
The possibilities of these nfc stickers are endless. Here are some ideas to spark your creativity:
Make your LP collection smart: stick an nfc sticker on the inside of an LP sleeve. If you scan this, the music will start playing on a streaming service or the video clip will start on your television via Apple TV.
Make your plant smart: stick an nfc sticker on your plant pot. Every time you water the plant, you scan the sticker to automatically put a message in your calendar. This way you will never forget when you watered the plant.
Make your medicines smart: Make sure you have a reminder in the Reminders app to take your meds. Scan the NFC tag on the medicine box to check off this reminder.
Go to bed smart: With a single nfc sticker you can program that, for example, all your lights go out, the temperature is lowered and the alarm is set. Handy next to your bed!
Do you have cool ideas of your own? Drop them in the comments, because then you can also inspire other readers.
Cheap smart home equipment
Usually cheap smart-home equipment is not a good idea. We explain why you should not buy a smart plug from the Action if privacy is important to you. In the case of the nfc stickers, however, you don’t have to worry.
