Back when Google announced the Nexus S and its NFC capabilities many idea’s came to mind. The amount of possibilities this technology can open is huge. A developer by the name of Eric Butler soon realized he could develop something easily that could read and hack public transit fare systems. Sounds illegal i know. This is just one of many many possibilities that Near Field Communications can provide.
When Google released the Gingerbread SDK with new NFC features, such as the Nexus S being able to read AND write NFC tags Butler decided it was time to look into things a little more. He picked up a Nexus S and really started testing the waters. He now has wrote an app that will read your public transit cards data. Pretty neat huh, Eric has now decided to release his project under the name Farebot. It can read and then display things like Balance, and travel history from Seattle’s ORCA Transit cards. It is said to also work with San Fransisco’s Clipper card.
Eric also has made this app completely open source so other developers will increase it’s usability and add other locations, cities, and other public transit systems like the NYC Metro System. If you are a dev get the source code here. Lets see what the amazing dev community can do with this.
[via Dangerous Prototypes]
