Pseudonymous maker “arduinocelentano,” hereafter merely “Celentano,” has written a information to salvaging single-use provide chain temperature screens with the intention to get better the surprisingly highly effective microcontrollers inside — turning them into reusable growth boards as an alternative of sending them off for recycling or into landfill.
“These small gadgets are used to trace the temperature of delicate supplies (like drugs, meals and many others.) throughout [its] transportation,” Celentano explains. “They’re often single-use gadgets and regarded to be e-waste as quickly as a cargo container is delivered. Sure, think about hundreds of vans all world wide delivering hundreds of bins with implanted little items of {hardware} destined to grow to be a heap of e-waste simply after few days of working. I disassembled a number of samples and came upon that a few of them may be reprogrammed and repurposed with a bit little bit of reverse engineering.”
Celentano’s work focuses on the Q-tag, which upon disassembly turned out to have STmicroelectronics STM32L152 microcontrollers inside — boasting a versatile Arm Cortex-M3 core working at as much as 32MHz and ultra-low-power working modes together with a quick 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) providing as much as one mega-samples per second (MSPS) decision.
Designed for only one use, disposable temperature loggers could be repurposed into purposeful growth boards. (📷: arduinocelentano)
“To detect which [pin] is which, you’ll want a multimeter set to continuity mode and a datasheet on your MCU [Microcontroller Unit],” Celentano explains of the right way to discover the Serial Wire Debug (SWD) required to reprogram the microcontroller and take away its inventory temperature-tracking performance. “Contact gently [the] MCU’s pin and a pad on the PCB along with your probes to detect whether or not they’re related. A minimum of you’ll must detect VCC3.3V, GND, SWDIO and SWDCLK pads to have the ability to program the microcontroller.”
As soon as the format is set, pins or wires could be soldered to offer a connection to a programming software — the STMicro ST-LINK, within the case of Celentano’s Q-tag boards. “If you end up positive that every thing works, you could set up STM32CubeIDE or configure an open-source growth atmosphere,” the maker provides. “Now you will have an reasonably priced growth board, and it’s as much as you to resolve the right way to use it. Perhaps it may be attainable to port Arduino to it and implement a USB bootloader or construct some personalized HID system.”
The total write-up is out there on Celentano’s Hackaday.io web page.