On Mon, 2018-03-26 at 21:47 -0400, John Stoffel wrote:

Adafruit.com has some stuff like this for sale. They're not always the cheapest, but they have great tutorials and example code.

Found a LWN article on NFC: https://lwn.net/Articles/645843/ He used a "PN532 NFC/RFID controller breakout board" and "FTDI Serial TTL-232 USB Cable" to connect via USB. It is supported by libnfc. His article talks about the Linux NFC being a better design and the future of NFC for linux. I haven't looked to see if it has progressed enough since his article to replace libnfc.

Looks like a good start. Probably cost you about $50 total to get started, if you dont' have a raspberry Pi kicking around.

(Still haven't got a raspberry Pi. I consider myself a software guy and not as interested in "raw" hardware. I got the PocketCHIP from kickstarter because it was a finished product. However I seem to be descending into hardware. I purchased TinyCircuit's TinyScreen Video Game Kit and they sent me a TinyArcade to port my Pac-Man clone to.)

This could be a really fun thing for the cubs to do! Especially if you could then sign their figures so that when they hit the reader, it knows it's them. Or something like that. Ask the kids for ideas!

Definitely plan to ask the kids for ideas. Just plan to test enough that I feel confident it is doable before asking them. Yesterday I took pictures of Skylanders to see at what scale they still look good. At 64 pixels wide they are a little grainy. 128 pixels wide looks pretty good. Skylanders apparently has catch phrases for characters so I would like to get each kid to record a catch phrase for their character.