cuplTag battery-powered NFC tag logs temperature and humidity (Crowdfunding)

Temperature and humidity sensors would normally connect to a gateway sending data to the cloud, the coin-cell battery-powered cuplTag NFC tag instead sends data to your smartphone after a tap.

CulpTag is controlled by an MSP430 16-bit microcontroller from Texas Instruments which reads and stores sensor data regularly into an EEPROM, and the data can then be read over NFC with the tag returning an URL with the data from the sensor and battery, then display everything on the phone’s web browser (no app needed).

cuplTag specifications:

MCU – Texas Instruments MSP430FR2155 16-bit microcontroller @ 24 MHz
Storage – 2K bytes EEPROM part of NT3H2111 for up to 188 temperature & humidity data points or 376 temperature-only data points
Connectivity – Passive NFC, tap-to-read via NXP NT3H2111 NFC tag
Sensors – HDC2021 temperature and humidity sensors
Measurement interval – 3 minutes to 65535 minutes (Default: 10 minutes)
Battery – CR1220 battery (not included) good for an estimated 7+ years
Power consumption – About ~1.5uA on average based on 10 minutes measurement interval achieve by remaining in LPM3 power modes most of the time.

Everything is open-source from the KiCad hardware design files to the MSP430 firmware and the cupldeploy web backend and frontend applications, all of which can be found on Github.

It seems quite an inefficient way to operate in terms of user time, but maybe there are some use cases where such a solution might be suitable. One advantage is that it’s easy to install just insert the battery what for a few hours, and come back with your NFC-enabled smartphone to visualize the data. The company says the cuplTag can be used in home and professional environments to grow plants, deter insects, monitoring laboratories and production environments, helping glues and epoxies cure more quickly, etc…

The cuplTag NFC sensor tag is available on Crowd Supply for $39 plus $8 shipping to the US and $18 to the rest of the world. If you’d like to change the board’s firmware a $153 MSP-FET Flash Emulation Tool appears to be required Rewards are expected to ship by the end of January 2022.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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5 Comments

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Sander

3 years ago

Ahhhh … the measured values are put into the path-part of the URL! And your phone get the full URL via NFC, and then feeds that path to the webserver in FQDN, which then presents it in a nice way.

Clever!

And because no wifi or zigbee is involved (at least: on the NFC tag), you can use the NFC tag anywhere. Cool

itchy n scratchy

Thanks for answering my questions before I had to ask them

sashz

~~to change the board’s firmware a $153 MSP-FET Flash Emulation Tool appears to be required~~

no need, i ported the sources of TI UART_BSL_MSP430FR_Command_Line_Utility to linux, it works over usb serial port which has extra DTR and RTS pins. I’m using usb ftdi board for this.

https://github.com/pdaxrom/SERIAL-BSL-MSP430FR-FLASHER

Thanks, would have been surprised if a generic uC like the MSP 430 would need anything more than a homebrewed programmer