NFC endeavours

NFC or near field communication has been around for years, I originally knew it as RFID. The first practical application I saw was, and still is the door control system at the London Hackspace, where you get your RFID card number put onto the list and to get into the space you simply swipe your card over the reader and the door opens. GLaDOS announcing your entrance is not only fun, but also practical, as everyone in the space knows who has just entered without having to look.

Well I fancy having a go at that, and bought myself a Touchatag reader with some tags, the same kit that's used in LHS, so that I can just copy what they've done, giving me a nice easy start point. At least that was the plan.

Bearing in mind that the Touchatag has been around for a while; searching for Linux Touchatag brings up a stack of hits and there are numerous sites covering how to get them to work together it really should be easy.

I've always found it best to go with the most up-to-date article I can find, and so I used this one, and pretty much followed it to the letter, although I couldn't patch the info file, but managed to get hold of one.

So when I came to run the first command I got an error:

error while loading shared libraries: libnfc.so.2:cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Damn, now a quick check back through to make sure I'd done everything correctly, and an email to Ben. I had to add the location of libnfc.so.2 to /etc/environment and that should be it.

Alas no.

The only thing that's different between my setup and Ben's is that I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 and he's using 10.04 and now... well I have nowhere to go with this. Annoying really, I know it should work.