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by obilgic 2136 days ago
Instead of explaining the tech and how it works, the site is just asking me to pick one of the wood species...
3 comments

They don't want you to know it can be done with a $1 NFC sticker
Is it still $1? I thought the price had dropped by now.
I imagine this is mostly for retail businesses, airbnb, etc. In which case, the technical details don't really matter -- if it works, then it just needs to look good, and that's the end of it.

But anyways for HN purposes, the hints are there -- WiFi Easy Connect Protocol exists as a standard; NFC requirement specified in the text;

It's a wooden wrapper around an NFC sticker that's being set to include the details necessary for WiFi Easy Connect to ... connect to your wifi.

Technically, I don't think this is notable at all really. The fact that its possible, and the imagination of having a simple block to slap your phone against when you enter a random shop/restaurant, are the main notable aspects.

Sitewise, it's ugly with no real color scheme, stupidly large spacing and gaps, and doesn't seem to be well tested (can't scroll the example images on mobile, they're entirely missing on desktop)

But content wise, this is pretty much ideal from an HN complaint perspective -- it's extremely clear about what they're selling you -- the only thing missing is that there's no pricing information on the front-page, for what I imagine is a single-price object

edit: Actually this site is pretty annoyingly broken, with clear bugs all over the place. And for god knows what reason, the chosen font (non-changeable?) is some kind of abomination of comic sans? The Peach Pit font on the front page is clearly cleaner and more professional -- why not just keep using that? For what was a pretty reasonably simple and pretty neat little product, the site has really turned me off of it.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/how-to/diy-nfc-coasters/

Seems like phones have an easy way to make your own DIY stickers, but I'm sure it's just a standard format that you could write with any username/pw/ap that you wanted.