A developer friend at work who knew that I worked on Arduinos was asked me if I wanted to build a part for a factory process they were trying to improve.
A friend of his had an Injection Molding company that makes rollers for a Chinese kiosk photo printing machine. The printing machine has to verify that the printer paper is “official” using an NFC chip in the roller. His company makes the injection molded rollers and has to insert the stamped NFC chip. Shown below.
NFC chip that gets inserted
plastic roller containing NFC chip on my home testing rig
He needed a device that can run on the conveyor process that verifies that the NFC chip was installed without being damaged (i.e it still functions as an NFC chip). My first run worked but had a few false negatives (didn’t recognize fast enough for the speed). After a few design reworks, and rethinking the polling, I found a design that worked as an excellent QA device for their process.
the final boards without the 3D printed case
boards in 3D printed case
early prototype
The part is assembled, and an NFC chip is inserted, then it goes on the conveyor. If it passes inspection, the gate is moved by the arduino, it gets counted and placed in a box. If no NFC chip is detected the gate does not move and the part gets forced into the bin with the 3D printed gate. It gets counted as a “reject” by an IR sensor as it drops in the bin and reran later.
ContractorWolf.com 
Photos aren’t displaying for me. Perhaps they aren’t public?
@dillion1337 sorry about that, I was using g+ photos and they must no longer allow just posting their extended urls versions of the files. I uploaded them to this server and fixed the urls. Let me know of they are still not showing for you. Thanks for letting me know. Are you working on something similar?
They’re working for me now. No particular reason for reading. Just have your blog in my Feedly.
Cool thanks for the assistance