Chris Dailey's Odiin Is a Self-Contained nRF52840-Powered NFC Tag Emulator Gadget

Chris Dailey has a prototype device designed to emulate near field communication (NFC) tags, built to sit somewhere between homebrew Arduino-based gadgets and professional tools like the Proxmark3: the Odiin.

"Odiin started off as a learning project as I explored the [Nordic] nRF52840 platform, and spent time learning about NFC as a whole," says Dailey of the project's origins. "I quickly realized I enjoyed reading arbitrary data and wanted to create a device that could do that with a swanky display. Additionally, it evolved as a tool when my wife and I realized we could use it to emulate our Amiibos, so we didn't have to pull them out of the bin every time we wanted to use them for our games."

"It's the only device out there that works quite like this. There's lots of high end NFC tools, like the wonderful (and far more expensive) Proxmark3, as well as a lot of 'do it yourself' solutions designed to be used by Arduinos and the sort. What I'm building looks to strike a happy middle ground between the two in terms of features and price, while being usable enough that anyone looking to do some NFC testing, tinkering, or learning!"

Dailey plans to include a range of functionality, including emulation of NRF Forum Type 2, NTAG213, NTAG 215, NTAG 216, MIFARE Classic and Ultralight C tag types. At present, Odiin has read support for NFC and NTAG, while MIFARE support is still on the to-do list — as is support for the NDEF payload format.

"This is absolutely a prototype," Dailey admits. "The firmware itself is not by any means finished, and there's very likely a fair amount of bugs. I'm getting these out there now, because it's difficult to know what the end-game toolkit would look like and do without feedback from folx! Odiin is open source! You're more than able to hack on the firmware yourself, or submit a pull or feature request for something you'd like to see it do!"

"If you dream of more than the NFC tool, and want to twist Odiin to do more things for you, this puppy has got a lot under the hood that you can do a lot with," Dailey continues, pointing out various additional features including Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, Mesh, Thread, and ZigBee compatibility, 8MB of QSPI flash, a 320x240 SPI LCD, and an ATWINC1500 module for 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity.

Dailey is selling the Odiin prototype design via Tindie at $169, plus $20 for a 3D-printed case; the design is also available on his GitHub repository under the permissive MIT license.