 This week's IonMPI is from ST. Every single week we do IonMPI brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. This is where we look at new product introductions, MPI, and the place that we like. Yeah, the place that we like and we think has the most MPIs is digikey.com. Well, they've got lots of new products all the time. So go to digikey.com slash new, and that's how I find what I'm going to cover on IonMPI. Yeah, it's not a secret. We, back in the day, when our website was a lot smaller, and there was people trying to do bad stuff to our website, we noticed that some of our competitors at the time, every morning they would look at Adafruit.com slash a new. I would too. And that's how they would figure out what they wanted to try to do next, because we were always coming up with really good stuff. And that's what you kind of do too. I do the same thing. So you go to digikey.com slash new to stay? I go to everybody's site slash new. Digikey.com slash new is where you'll get all the latest component MPIs. So this week, the newest, latest, hardest from ST? Yes. Okay, so this week from ST, we've got the ST25DV. I actually really liked when I saw this pop up, because I was like, hey, I know this ship. I even made a breakout for this ship, so I know a lot about it, and I know what it can do. So I thought this would be a really good MPI, because I can really talk to you in depth. There's also a lot of good information from ST about this chip. So this chip is a dynamic NFC RFID tag I see with 416 or 64 kilobit EEPROM fast transfer mode capability and optimized I squared C comes in a bunch of different packages. You can see it comes in four different packages there. And it's an NFC chip. And this is an interesting chip, because when a lot of people talk about RFID or NFC, they think about RFID tags that look like this. And if you see, you know, there's the card and the sticker and the circular tag. But if you look at the clear tag or the clear key fob, you see that there is an antenna made of coil of wire. It's kind of like a made of magnet wire, so it's reddish or orange-ish. And in the center, there's like the silvery blob with only two pads on it. And that's an RFID chip that is fully powered and takes data over the RF link created when energy enters the coil that is, you know, the data and power transfer. RFID and NFC. NFC is kind of a, it's a near field communication, so it's a larger scale thing than RFID, which is a very specific thing just for identification. So I'm just going to refer to NFC, but a lot of people use the two terms kind of back and forth. So these tags, they have memory built in and you can read, write, or authenticate through them. So oftentimes they're used as, you know, public transport identification or you have RFID and NFC in your credit card. They're very inexpensive and they're great if you want to just transmit a small amount of data without needing a battery. However, they're not smart. Like you can't run code or like have the data inside the tag change on the fly. Like whatever you write to it is what you read from it next time. It's just, it's just a little piece of memory that is powered and has data over RFID. So this, which is, this is the breakout we have. This chip is interesting because it has that same coil antenna you see at the top, the coil antenna that's built into the circuit board. You could of course use an external antenna, but you know, it's convenient to have it printed onto the PCB. It's inexpensive. Oh, it's a little bit large. And over I squared, so you can communicate to it. So you can read or write data over I squared C or through RFID. And so that gives it a kind of a dynamic ability to act as a bridge between NFC communication and microcontrollers that don't have NFC. It's quite rare for microcontroller to have NFC built into it. But this chip, which is very inexpensive, lets you bridge that data and do it. It's useful for a couple different things. So because we already have this breakout in the store, here's an example. When this phone goes over the tag, it's been pre-programmed with a URL, you could see that it's the product URL. And we program that in the factory. But what's interesting is, of course, if you had a microcontroller attached to it, you could change what tag with the data is read from the tag on the fly based on whatever data you'd like. So you can use it as a way of advertising data sort of the way Bluetooth does, but without any batteries. So inside, you know, it itself is not a program on microcontroller. It is only iSquared C or RFID, but it's got a couple cool things going for it. One is it uses ISO 1593, which is not what most people think of as, you know, classic my fair or my fair does fire or my fair light or whatever. It is a different protocol. So, you know, it doesn't necessarily work with our PN 532 breakouts, but it does have support from like pretty much every modern phone iOS and Android phones. If they have NFC support, they'll support this chip. Inside is both a dynamic RAM buffer and an eProm buffer. The dynamic buffer is just faster to write the eProm buffer as I expect you write it and it is maintained over, you know, 100,000 cycles or more. Also has this cool energy harvesting capability, which I think is neat. I'll show you a little demo of that in a bit, not demo from me from ST. So one thing that is nice about this ISO format is compared to most, it can actually go much farther. I will say that the distance is dependent a lot about whether how good the antenna is. So at the bottom where you see it's like, you know, a couple of feet up to a meter, it, you know, you that's for a not a phone, it's for my dynamic reader with a good antenna. Speaking of which one thing that I thought was really cool is ST has an eDesign website where you can dynamically design the antenna you need based on in the data sheet tells you what the you're based on the frequency and the built in capacitance you can tune what inductance you want and then you can use this tool. You can say how physically large you want the antenna to be and I'll tell you the trace width and the number of turns and the inductance. So it kind of does like this method is told pain to do by hand. So I use this tool when I design the antenna for the NFC breakout. It does have energy harvesting built in. This is also kind of neat because a lot of people like the idea of energy harvesting. It has some use cases where not only would the ST 25 DV be powered over the energy harvesting from the NFC electromagnetic waves, but also you could have an external circuit connected. And so there's even an LDO built in CC won't go above 2.7 volts. But you can get up to I think 2.7 volts. Yeah, you can get up to 1.1 milliamps to 7 milliamps based on the field strength and the voltage that you want out of it and you're willing to drive from it. You know, once you're getting into 4 milliamps, you can drive a low power microcontroller can run off of it for a short amount of time. So, you know, if you want to do some data transfer from microcontroller from a sensor using NFC could be preferable to something like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi where you need a battery. I'm using a coin cell here because this is a common low power battery source. But you know, there's there's a big gulf between having no battery or having a totally energy harvesting solution and having a battery. Once you have a battery, suddenly have to deal with replacing the battery, having it be replaceable. So you have to do will open the case and move it. You have to make sure the battery doesn't get damaged or there's like chemical corrosion. If it's in there too long, if it to recharge your batteries to recharge it, you know, batteries, it's like it's not just the cost of the battery. There's a lot of support circuitry and design required for it. So if you know you can get away with not having a battery, I think that could be interesting. Here's a design for a ink a tag that is completely data is transmitted reprogrammed over NFC. Now you're going to have to hold that NFC tag fairly close so it can go through the update cycle, which takes 20 seconds. But you don't have a battery. Maybe you prefer that maybe from a meter away. This is this is useful enough. There is a library for the ST 25 DV. This is the I squared C side, of course, from the NFC side, you know, you just use it according to any API you've got for iOS or Android. It acts as a normal tag it that the mobile device does not know the difference between it and any other ISO whatever 15963 tag. There's also the K and the KC version. I'll say I looked for a little bit and I believe the big difference is there's a there's a couple of little details, but you can change the I squared C address of the KC family. Otherwise, it seems like they're pin to pin compatible and functionally very, very similar. So you can you can pretty much use either. I've used the K because the KC was an app. I'm going to check the details of this more and best of all, they're in stock. That's right. Love it when the IMPI is in stock. So pick it up. You can use our open source design if you want to get started also a valve boards from ST. But I think it's an interesting way you want to transmit data to and from a mobile device, not have to deal with deployment, not have to deal with Bluetooth or pairing or batteries. This could really be a good solution. You know, there's you know, there's a couple of presentations on the ST website with demonstrations of what they think it could be good for. So all right, and we have a video. Do you want to play it? Yeah, let's play the video. This is from ST showing their sensor tag, which is another product that uses this chip and a microcontroller to data log and then transmit that data log data to a mobile device. Okay, it's two minutes. See any other side? Hi, I'm Jim Barlow with ST's NFC RFID marketing. We're here at Sensors Expo in San Jose and we're introducing our new low power NFC sensor tag reference design. It highlights many of our low power sensors for your design, such as the low power accelerometer, barometer pressure sensor, humidity and temperature sensor, and our low power cortex M0. What the sensor tag allows you to do is completely, this entire board can be read through an NFC field from your phone, for instance, and can be completely powered through the energy harvesting capability of the NFC IC on here, the ST25DV, NFC dynamic tag. You can completely power up this microprocessor and the sensors and read that data, but we've designed this reference design to now allow you to enable in your designs the ability to data log. So you can design, you can test, like for instance you could test if something stays cold during shipments, if it encounters vibrations or maybe heat during the shipment, and then when you come in range of a near field communications, you can take that data log information out and make intelligent decisions, like for instance if you had a case of wine shipped to you at your home and you're wondering why it tastes bad, you can detect that it was stored at too high of a temperature. So this new reference design is now available on ST.com, and we look forward to you designing and being very successful with your projects. Thank you. That is a thing, sensor expo. This is one, by the way, that's one of the places we want to go to. Sensor expo. We went to a couple of shows that I can't wait until we can do it again when we go to pick and places. We went to, there's giant commercial shows that have all the stuff, and sensor expo is one of them for that. So that is that this week's IonMPI. IonMPI.