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Tap-to-book with inki: NFC-triggered room reservation on ePaper

A project log for inki - low power wireless epaper device

compact, energy-efficient, battery-powered system for ePaper-based display of information gathered via Wi-Fi

casparcaspar 04/29/2026 at 07:280 Comments

Using seatsurfing and inki door signs for some time in real life now, one thing that happens quite often to me is that I forget to book. So, it would be nice to be able to book arriving at the office using inki directly, instead of having to go to the homepage. 

The solution: Using the concept from my NFC2026 Green Power Challenge project https://hackaday.com/2026/04/20/2026-green-power-challenge-nfc-powers-command-write-and-wake-of-mcu/ I now can book by tapping my cell phone to the door sign, and the corresponding seat is booked in our seatsurfing instance https://seatsurfing.io/

Tap your phone on the inki sign to book a desk — the Android app writes your booking request via NFC into the ST25DV chip, which harvests just enough RF energy from your phone to wake the sleeping microcontroller, create the booking on the seatsurfing server over WiFi, and refresh the ePaper display with the updated information.

I also played around with some other stuff one could do with that:

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