Heart-Shaped Microcontroller Board Known as I Love ST

Overview

The project is a combination of touching sentiment with touch capacitance that are bonded in a small red heart-shaped PCB with red LEDs around to produce the I Love ST microcontroller evaluation board.

Explanation

The basis of the heart-shaped pendant is the STR750FV2T6Z ARM7TDMI-S 32-bit microcontroller with 256kb RAM, STR711F R2T6 32-bit microcontroller with 64kb RAM, and USB interface in 64-pin package. The dedicated clock/calendar function is supplied by the independent 32.768kHz clock crystal from the first microcontroller mentioned. The ARM cores are programmed by the onboard JTAG with mini-USB connector. For standalone operation, a 3V lithium battery is used. For ARM devices kick start version, it uses IAR Embedded Workbench IDE.

The heart silkscreen on the face of the I Love ST PCB is activated by the Power Pac Demo. This makes the PCB as a touch capacitance control for changing the speed of the LED flashing sequence. Likewise, the intensity of the flashing LEDs are varied by the adjacent ST logo silkscreen that serves the same as a touch capacitance control.

A mini-ROM cut-off CD disc is also included that features information on ST Microelectronic’ 8-, 16-, and 32-bit microcontrollers.