I’m working with a student on building a small autonomous robot platform, based on the FRDM-KL25Z board. We integrated new software modules, compiled and linked, and then downloaded the application to the board. While debugging and stepping through the application startup, I had this:
The Debugger has lost communication on connection
Outsch! That’s not good. Even worse, trying to connect again to the board failed 
. What happened?
You have decided: More than 52% voted in Part 1 that the next topic should be Timed Servo Moves. So here we go 
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This is about how to move the servos over time, instead of moving it to the given position as fast as possible. I’m using a linear approach here: moving the servos linearly over time.
Moving Servo Motors
With the Zumo I have a base platform for cool robotics applications. So why not build a line following robot with this? Especially as Pololu offers a reflectance sensor array for it. The result is: I have a line following robot
Line Following ZumoBot
It turned out that things were not working out of the box with the FRDM-KL25Z board. So if you want to do the same thing, here are some tips how to make it working with the Freedom board.
It happens to me that I run into a really, really nasty problem. I spend hours (if not weeks) to get it resolved. Strong coffee and the problem keeps me up at long nights. I think every embedded system engineer knows what I’m talking about. Yeah, most of the time it is my fault or an oversight. But once in a while I’m convinced that I have found a real bug. Then I report it back to the vendor to fix it. I hope my report will prevent another engineers to run into the same problem. Or that I learn something else as a by-product. Oh yes….
The update 1.0.0 for the MCU10.2 release has been published on the Freescale CW MCU V10.2 Updates & Patches web site. Downloading the 500 MByte zip file and installing the update will take a while. After downloading I select Help > Install New Software … and specify the archive file.
Note: In general uninstalling an eclipse update is not possible. If you want to keep our original MCU10.2 on the side, then follow this trick: Copy your existing MCU10.2 installation folder and rename it (say to ‘MCU10.2_without_update’). Then apply the update to the normal MCU10.2. If you want to revert to the version without the update, simple delete the updated installation and rename the one without the update again. No need to reinstall things again. And you can use both the updated version and the normal version in parallel too: simply launch the eclipse\cwide you want
Time to read the release notes and dig into what has been changed and improved.
Ahhrg! Again, my microcontroller stopped in an interrupt. And I have no clue why?
Using Processor Expert in MCU10 is a great thing as it takes care about the vector table. Usually the default settings for code generation are fine, but not in my case here. If you run into a spurious and unexpected interrupt, you stop in the Cpu_Interrupt() handler:
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