STMicroelectronics has announced the M24LR Discovery Kit, a low cost development platform for NFC or RFID applications with energy-harvesting capabilities. This devkit is aimed at accelerating the design and development of batterlyless applications such as phone and tablet accessories, computer peripherals, electronic shelf labels, home appliances, industrial automation, sensing and monitoring systems, and personal healthcare products.

The M24LR Discovery Kit consists of two boards:

an RF transceiver board with a 13.56MHz multi-protocol RFID/NFC transceiver driven by an STM32 32-bit microcontroller

A battery-less board that includes ST’s dual-interface EEPROM memory IC, an ultra-low-power 8-bit microcontroller (STM8L) and a temperature sensor.

Here are the key features of the boards:

M24LR board M24LR04E-RMN6T/2 Dual Interface EEPROM with I2C and ISO/IEC 15693 RF interfaces, 4 Kbits of EEPROM and password protection in SO8N package STM8L152C6T6 8-bit microcontroller, with 8 Kbytes of Flash memory STTS751-0WB3F, low-voltage digital temperature sensor 20 x 40 mm inductive antenna etched on the PCB Two function buttons (User and Reset) SWIM connector for programming and debugging I2C connectors LCD (24 segments, 4 commons)



RF transceiver board CR95HF-VMD5T 13.56 MHz multi-protocol contactless transceiver IC with SPI and UART serial access STM32F103CB 32-bit microcontroller, with 128 Kbytes of Flash memory 47 x 34 mm 13.56 MHz inductive antenna etched on PCB and associated circuitry USB connector for communication with host PC (Windows 2000, XP, Vista or 7) and demonstration board powering



M24LR board gets its power by harvesting the radio waves emitted by the RF transceiver board or NFC phones or tablets supporting ISO/IEC 15693 standard for vicinity cards (Read distance up to 1-1.5m). STMicro has published an NfcV-reader Android app in order to allow Android mobile devices that support NFC to communicate with the M24LR board.

The company also provides data brief, user manual, schematics & gerber files for both boards, and firmware & software demos for M24LR board.

The development kit is sampling now, and is available for the recommended price of $17.50 via ST Micro distributors. You can find more information on STMicro M24LR Discovery Kit page.