My previous post ended with me waiting for delivery of a surface-mount SWD connector so I could turn a Freescale Kinetis KwikStik K40 into a Segger J-Link compatible debug probe. I placed an order with Farnell UK for an appropriate connector, and it arrived the next day. Soldering the connector was surprisingly difficult. I had …
Although I had some success with using the Segger firmware on a Freescale FRDM board to program a KE04 microcontroller on a header board recently, I was very aware that I was being naughty. The terms of use for the Segger firmware make it clear that it is only for programming and debugging genuine Freescale …
If you have read my previous post in this series, you’ll know that I had mixed feelings about the LPC810 and LPC812 chips from NXP. They are certainly simple and flexible in use, but without a stable and predictable technique to program them I just ended up more frustrated. However, I impressed myself by successfully …
Continue reading ‘ARM Cortex-M board from scratch part 3: Kinetis KE04’ »
Another demo that I saw while at the Freescale Tech Day was also pretty simple, but already moving a step beyond the traditional Arduino examples. It’s just blinking a LED, but rather than the “brute force” approach of switching the pin then forcing a wait before switching it again (the algorithm in the classic Arduino …
Continue reading ‘Using a timer interrupt with KDS and K64F’ »
Today, I thought I’d have a go at running one of the simple demonstrations I saw at the recent Freescale Tech Day in Milton Keynes. I have a FRDM-K64F development board which I bought a few weeks ago, and my fresh installation of the KDS IDE. The K64F is a lovely board with a powerful …
Continue reading ‘A first project with FRDM-K64F and Kinetis Design Studio’ »
No post yesterday, as I was attending a “Designing with Freescale” Tech Day. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know that I like working with Freescale ARM microcontrollers, particularly with their low cost and surprisingly powerful FRDM range of development boards. For once, I had a day where …
After spending the last few days messing with a MCP3002 SPI ADC chip, I’m beginning to wonder if it is not really suitable for my needs after all. Both the SPI libraries I have tried have had problems with excess waiting around transfers, which becomes very significant when each new sample requires a whole new …
Continue reading ‘Reading an analogue value in C on a Freescale Freedom KL25Z’ »
As you may recall, I have plans to use a Freescale ARM development board (such as a KL25Z, or a K20D50M) as an I/O interface for at least one Raspberry Pi project. These boards are a bit like a super-Arduino: small enough to fit in the archetypal mint ton, bristling with pins for digital, analog, …
Continue reading ‘Code Warrior, Eclipse, and Freedom boards’ »
After my previous post on delimiter-free languages it occurred to me that the idea of txtzyme has merit for communication between some of the devices I have to hand. Some while ago I spent some time producing some bare-metal code examples for the Raspberry Pi (flashing morse code, GPIO control and uart stuff, for example), …
It recently occurred to me that I have been accumulating microcontroller development boards for a while, so I thought I’d lay them out for a photo! Reading left to right, top to bottom you can see: STM32 “value line” Discovery board STM32-L Discovery board STM32-F0 Discovery board STM32-F4 Discovery Board Cubieboard Freescale Freedom KL05Z Freescale …
Continue reading ‘Is it possible to have too many microcontrollers?’ »