Development board MOUSE for the younger generations of embedded engineers

MOUSE or MiŠKO (Sloven­ian: MIkrokr­mil­niš­ki Štu­dents­ki KOm­plet) is a develop­ment board orig­i­nal­ly intro­duced by the Fac­ul­ty of Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing in Ljubl­jana, Slove­nia, to bring embed­ded hard­ware and soft­ware clos­er to stu­dents.


The first MOUSE was cre­at­ed in 2011 based on Microchip ATmega324 micro­con­troller. It fea­tures a USB-A con­nec­tor, USB-UART con­vert­er, a two-line alphanu­mer­ic LCD screen, and other sim­ple periph­er­als.

Stu­dents were not only learn­ing the basics of the micro­con­troller archi­tec­ture, assem­bler and C pro­gram­ming, but they were also man­u­fac­tur­ing the board includ­ing sol­der­ing it on its own.


After 6 years, it was replaced by MOUSE V2, which is built around a Microchip ATmega328PB micro­con­troller pro­vid­ing a big upgrade regard­ing periph­er­als. A graph­ic color screen with touch detec­tion and many other addi­tion­al periph­er­als were added. Thus, com­pared to the pre­de­ces­sor, MOUSE V2 gained main­ly on the larg­er periph­er­al set.

When we look at MOUSE V3, it’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent story.


Where and how do we enter the story?

TASKING Labs, our Sloven­ian sub­sidiary, entered the story in 2019 when the pro­fes­sor of the Fac­ul­ty of Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing was look­ing for part­ners and ideas for the next gen­er­a­tion of MOUSE V3.

As we already tight­ly coop­er­at­ed on mul­ti­ple occa­sions, e.g. work­shops for stu­dents, prax­is, and the­sis men­tor­ing, the project and ideas start­ed com­ing togeth­er. A stu­dent who by coin­ci­dence start­ed with a prax­is at TASKING Labs, joined the project and pushed the project for­ward.

Dur­ing the sum­mer of 2021 the idea was real­ized and MOUSE V3 pro­to­type was devel­oped.

The whole develop­ment took place at Labs which excels in the entire ver­ti­cal chain of hard­ware pro­duc­tion, from idea to the final prod­uct all in one house. With almost 30 years of expe­ri­ence in:
•    Schemat­ics design,
•    PCB design,
•    Hous­ing design,
•    Assem­bling com­plex elec­tron­ic boards includ­ing BGA com­po­nents,
•    Test­ing;
the stu­dent develop­ment board MOUSE was a piece of (cheese) cake!
 

misko mouse tasking board

We created a “Monster” MOUSE!

The newest ver­sion of MOUSE, which can run with­out being con­nect­ed to a PC, con­sists of:

  • 32-bit STM32G474 ARM Cor­tex-M4 micro­con­troller from STMi­cro­elec­tron­ics,
  • USB hub which enables com­mu­ni­ca­tion:
    • with ST-LINK debug­ger
    • UART con­vert­er
    • USB inter­face via USB-C con­nec­tor for pro­gram­ming and power
  • Big­ger LCD
  • CAN and LIN com­mu­ni­ca­tion inter­faces
  • Core­Sight 20-pin con­nec­tor for advanced code debug­ging and trac­ing
  • User-friend­ly and game con­sole inter­face design

With MOUSE V3 all stu­dents who study Pro­gram­ming will be able not only to learn the basics of micro­con­trollers but also build the sys­tem from scratch and smell the sol­der of their own develop­ment board.
Beside TASKING Labs, the fac­ul­ty, and the stu­dents, the fol­low­ing com­pa­nies also joined the project by pro­vid­ing some MOUSE com­po­nents for free:

  • STMi­cro­elec­tron­ics
  • Wurth Elek­tron­ik Eisos d.o.o.
  • IC elek­tron­i­ka d.o.o.
  • Intec­tiv d.o.o.
  • LPVO, Fac­ul­ty of Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing, Ljubl­jana

What does the future hold?

TASKING Labs will sup­port the project in the future and assem­ble one batch per year for all stu­dents of pro­gram­ming.
Project is host­ed as an open-source project on the GitHub account.

Wouldn’t you agree that this is a 100 % suc­cess story?

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