RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents, a leading distributor of electronics and maintenance products, has announced availability of the M24LR Discovery Kit from STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications. The M24LR Discovery Kit is an easy-access development platform for contactless memories with unique energy harvesting capabilities. It contains everything engineers need to start designing battery-free electronic applications that can exchange data with ISO/IEC15693-compatible NFC-enabled smartphones or RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) reader-writers. The turn-key development platform helps accelerate the creation and integration of energy-autonomous data collection, asset tracking or diagnostics capabilities in a wide variety of applications, including phone and tablet accessories, computer peripherals, electronic shelf labels, home appliances, industrial automation, sensing and monitoring systems, and personal healthcare products. With its unique combination of industry-standard serial-bus (I2C) and contactless RF interfaces, ST's M24LR dual interface EEPROM memory has the ability to communicate with the host system ‘over-the-wire' or ‘over-the-air.' Furthermore, the M24LR's RF interface can convert ambient radio waves emitted by RFID reader-writers and NFC phones or tablets into energy to power its circuits and enable complete battery-free operation. The M24LR Discovery Kit consists of two boards: an RF transceiver board with a 13.56MHz multi-protocol RFID/NFC transceiver (CR95HF) with SPI and UART serial access driven by an STM32 32-bit microcontroller, which powers and communicates wirelessly with a battery-less board that includes ST's dual-interface EEPROM memory IC (M24LR), an ultra-low-power 8-bit microcontroller (STM8L) and a temperature sensor (STTS75). RS Components
