Oyster Card Beep Sound Download
Its been 15 years since Londoners first got their hands on the Oyster Card, the travel card that's now synonymous with wallets across the capital. The piece below, originally written in 2016, explains exactly what makes your little blue friend tick.
The gates clunk open. Volkswagen headline font download. The Oyster card has become synonymous with London transport, but, for most of us, it’s nothing more than another card in the wallet. It’s technology reduced to nothing but two noises: a happy beep or an angry blip.
Free Beep Sound Download
Inside that slip of blue plastic, however, there’s more than just a dumb microchip. How does it work? At its most basic, an Oyster card works with radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, which is the same technology used by NFC in smartphones.
Load Beep Card
Beep Sound Download
Place an Oyster card near a suitable RFID reader, and an electromagnetic field is created between the reader and the chip in your Oyster card. This allows data to be transferred from the reader to your card, indicating that you’ve either started or finished a leg of your journey. The Oyster card receives data, and the reader records the card’s unique user ID, so you can think of it rather like a paper ticket being stamped. You’ll need to hold it a bit closer to the reader, Boris. The clever bit is that there’s no power source in the Oyster card itself – when it’s close enough to the card reader, the reader sends energy to the card via radio waves, generating power via a phenomenon known as electromagnetic induction.