From my last post, I have done various amounts of research and had suggestions made to me by those on Reddit about the flaws in my theory.

Firstly, and probably the most annoying, USB splitters don’t really exist. They exist to provide extra charge to a USB hard drive or some other sort of device, but for my purpose, I cannot, sadly, split NFC data from the reader to the printer as well as my Pi.

Secondly, I have done research on the readers the printers are set up with and they are ‘plug-n-play’ compatible with most operating systems. This gives me hope for its compatibility with libnfc, and even the fact I might not need it. I plugged the reader into my windows 10 PC and it loaded up a ‘Keyboard driver’ and then nothing… I was expecting maybe an autorun of some sorts, but I’ll just need to download something to interact with it I guess. I’ll be trying out libnfc with it later today.

To address the first issue, I am going to find a way to pass information from the Pi to the printer with a male to male USB cord (Unless this wouldn’t work either?) or via the network – but that requires it to be connected, and I would need to investigate if there were viable ethernet ports near the printer. (WiFi is too hard to crack, they give us our laptops with the password locked off by admin)

Thanks for reading this little update, please theorise suggestions! Will probably post another one by the end of the day.