Probably the cheapest way of making amiibo clones.

Amiibos are the NFC-enabled figurines and cards manufactured by Nintendo. There is a lot of games for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS which use amiibo in a number of ways. Learn more about amiibo on Nintendo site

Nowadays there is more and more games appear which annoyingly ask the player to buy new figurines. It’s more comfortable and fun to play! — they say. Other games went even farther and don’t work without amiibos at all.

If you’re a collector and don’t mind spending 10-15 bucks on another figurine then you can stop reading right here. This article might be interesting for more practical and thrifty readers who would like to get familiar with amiibo but don’t want to spend a lot of money on a collection of certainly beautiful but pretty useless things the main purpose of which is to collect dust on shelves.

And probably you’re trying to protect your amiibo figurines so hard that you don’t want to touch them at all. Then this article may be useful for you! You will be able to make the exact copies of your figurines and play with them, while the originals are kept in a safe!

Interested? Then let’s do it!

Ready-made amiibos

Many readers come here to make their own amiibos for Breath of the Wild, Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart and other games.
Luckily there are ready-made sets available online:

First let’s check that we have all the tools required:

Getting the NFC tag UID

First let’s find all the required info on the NFC tag which we want to write the amiibo dump into.

Use the Dumpinfo sketch which comes with the NFC shield library in order to get the NFC tag UID.

Run the sketch and put the card on the reader:

Tag UID

In my case, the UID is: 0403482AE33E81

Getting the amiibo dump

Now it is required to dump the amiibo figurine that we have. Dumps from the Internet are suitable too. Usually you can find them by googling “Amiibo BINs”.

I made an Arduino sketch to make amiibo dumps which is called Dump_amiibo. It’s enough to upload it into Arduino and put the figurine on the reader. In a few seconds the dump will appear on the screen. Just copy it into a hex-editor and save the resulting file. In this example I called mine as Chibi-Robo.dump.bin.

Decoding, editing, and encoding the dump

Now prepare the dump to be written to the tag.

Go to https://games.kel.mn/amiibo, pick your dump, the key then specify the UID of the blank tag. Press “Submit”.

On the next page you will get the code of the dump made specifically for your tag.

Writing the dump into the NFC tag

Now this code should be pasted into the Write_amiibo Arduino sketch.

Copy the results into the sketch:

Paste dump here

Run the sketch, put the tag, wait till the writing process is finished.

After you see the “Write finished! Now please take your Amiibo card away!” message it is safe to take the tag away.

Results

If all the steps were performed correctly then your amiibo clone is ready!

Pwned!
Pwned!

Buying Guide

Ultimate Arduino Bundle

Comes with all the required devices plus a lot of extras for your future projects!

$35.09

Buy Now
AliExpress

Arduino Uno

Latest revision, USB cable included

$7.14

Buy Now
AliExpress

NFC module

Reads and writes NFC tags

$2.14

Buy Now
AliExpress

Wires

Conveniently connect Arduino with NFC module

$1.13

Buy Now
AliExpress

10 NFC tags

Just enough to try

$7.62

Buy Now
AliExpress

20 NFC tags

If you don’t want to run out of tags too soon

$11.08

Buy Now
AliExpress

50 NFC tags

A fair amount of blank tags

$11.20

Buy Now
AliExpress

100 NFC tags

Enough to fit more than a half of all existing amiibos!

$43.32

Buy Now
AliExpress
Prices may differ, I periodically update them by hand. Last update: Nov 4, 2021

Sources:
Making Amiibo NTAG215s — GBATemp.net
NTAG213/215/216 datasheet
bkifft’s amiiscript.sh