NS50 LF RFID reader underneath touchpad

NitroPad, NitroPC
1

Playing around with an RFID-reader detector I found there’s an LF RFID reader at the right hand side of the touchpad of the NS50.

I’ve yet to find how this is attached to the internal bus (i2C, USB, ?) Thus far, only glancing not really looking, I’ve yet to find if a module is loaded or if the device is even known to Linux.

Should anyone else have found this RFID reader or know how to use it, help is welcome.

loading the modules: nfc nfcmrvl_uart nfcmrvl_usb nfcsim
shows some response and one uart registration

[ 6688.219034] nfc: nfc_init: NFC Core ver 0.1
[ 6743.997995] NCI uart driver ‘nfcmrvl_uart [0]’ registered
[ 6746.429367] usbcore: registered new interface driver nfcmrvl
[ 6789.019517] nfcsim 0.2 initialized

Please share your findings or what software to use. Assuming there may exist PAM modules for this.

2

Very interesting. If you mention this, it means it is not listed in the specs!
Would this also possibly affect the newer NS70?

3

Hey. To follow up.

As i tried to reproduce detection for the reader I’ve repeated the steps. For some reason or other I now fail to repeat detecting the reader. It is yet unclear to me why.

I will open a case with Nitrokey support and update here if i remember.

The detection of the NFC reader happened using a device used to detect NFC readers, which it detected reliably and repeatedly.

To document this detection I removed and reinstalled the software which seemed to reproduce the installation. The NFC detector does not discover it again though. I assume I missed a command or other step which actually activated the card reader.

4

When I read your first message, I wondered if it could be a fingerprint reader, because that is available for the platform. Anyway, once you get to see the device with a modprobe again, you should check lsusb what device is listed for it. Also, the kernel dmesg might show a message (just grep it for “nfc” , “usb”) about why no module is autoloaded.

5

We did some tests here and as of now we cannot confirm that there really is an nfc reader - although I would not exclude this option entirely.

If I load the modules you listed I get similar dmesg outputs on a machine for which I am sure there is no nfc reader:

[23971.651322] nfc: nfc_init: NFC Core ver 0.1
[23971.651352] NET: Registered PF_NFC protocol family
[23983.322913] NCI uart driver 'nfcmrvl_uart [0]' registered
[23994.638967] usbcore: registered new interface driver nfcmrvl
[24013.706468] nfcsim 0.2 initialized

So I am not sure whether these lines confirm the existence of an NFC reader (at least not for the case with the non NS50 machine I am testing on) - I would expect such an device to appear on either lsusb and/or lspci, which remain unchanged after loading these modules

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