Hey guys, I’m trying to get into automation, but I don’t really know that much about the languages these tools live in. I do a lot of time tracking, and one of the most annoying ones to do is tracking the time I spend getting from place to place. The best way I can think to do this is to get an NFC Tag that I put in my bag that I can tap with my phone to start a timer, but I don’t know how to approach this. Any suggestions?
NFC tags can only have one encoding as far as I know, so you’d only be able to start one timer with it. However you can use geofencing as a way to start timers too which has even less thinking involved (though a little less accuracy is the trade off)
Full disclosure, I don’t do anything with tags currently so my knowledge is limited there, but I have play with this stuff in the past. That said,
What timer app are you using? There are a few that have integrations with automation apps like Tasker. So you could use Tasker with one of those timer apps (I use one called aTimeLogger). You will also need another NFC tag app that works with Tasker, of which there are several but I don’t have a recommendation. Just search on the Play Store for Tasker NFC. I think I’ve used Trigger in the past though.
So you could set up a travel timer, make a profile in Tasker to react to a particular NFC that toggles a the timer on and off when tapped. If you need more help, let me know what app(s) you are using so that maybe we can do more.
Now that I think about it there may be a tracking app with NFC support built in…
I am working on doing something similar but with Toggl. I would like to trigger a Toggl timer when I connect to a specific Bluetooth device.