Android NFC with USB-NFC-Reader

Question

I have an Android tablet with Android 4.2. This tablet does not have NFC hardware. However I have an external USB reader: ACR 1252U, that came with an Android library. This library unfortunately only gives me basic functionality - read and write Tags. Altough this is working quite well, it is not enough...

Because for my application I need to transfer files from my Android 4.2 tablet to other NFC devices (Android smartphones). So I need to put the NFC reader into peer-to-peer mode - which it supports. But how can I achive this with my setup? There indeed is an SDK for that reader, but it's Windows only.

• Is it somehow possible, to use the built-in NFC-functions from Android with the external USB reader?
• Is there another library for this reader, that supports peer-to-peer communication with other NFC-devices?
• Is there another Hardware that I can use, to make this work?

Edit: The linked question does NOT solve my problem:

1. It is 3.5 years old. On might think, that in meantime has changed a lot.
2. The answer to that question (= use the Android ACS library), is part of my own question... So it can't be the answer.

Answer 1

Is it somehow possible, to use the built-in NFC-functions from Android with the external USB reader?

No, that's not possible. If your Android devices did not ship with NFC, there simply is no built-in NFC functionality (not even on the software side). The Android NFC API is essentially an empty stub implementation that does nothing on such a device.

Is there another library for this reader, that supports peer-to-peer communication with other NFC-devices?

The library from ACS does not prevent you from accessing the reader's peer-to-peer capabilities, so I don't see why you would want to use a different library. See section 5.9 of the API specification on how to use the reader's peer-to-peer capabilities.

I need to transfer files from my Android 4.2 tablet to other Android NFC devices

Based on that request I assume that you want to use something like Android Beam to establish some fast out-of-band channel over NFC and then transfer the (large?) files over that out-of-band channel (e.g. WiFi or Bluetooth).

In that case, you would need to re-implement the Android Beam stack (NFC peer-to-peer mode + LLCP + Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol + establishing out-of-band communication channel + transfering file over that channel)