Recovering and Updating the NXP OpenSDA Bootloader with P&E Multilink and MCUXpresso IDE

Many of the NXP OpenSDA boot loaders are vulnerable to Windows 8.x or Windows 10: write accesses of Windows can confuse the factory bootloader and make the debug firmware and bootloader useless. In this post I show how to recover the bootloader using MCUXpresso IDE and the P&E Universal Multilink.

Using P&E Multilink Universal to restore the OpenSDA Bootloader on NXP FRDM-K22F Board

Using P&E Multilink Universal to restore the OpenSDA Bootloader on NXP FRDM-K22F Board

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Sunrise with Swan on Lake Lucerne

Image

Title says everything 😉

Sunrise in Lucerne

Sunrise in Lucerne

Picture from this morning at 6:45am. Getting back to work after spending a hiking week in the Dolomites with two more posts to go. Going to work has its own beauty.

Happy Swaning 🙂

Tutorial: Porting BLE+NRF Kinetis Design Studio Project to MCUXpresso IDE

The tools and IDE market is constantly changing. Not only there is every year at least one new major Eclipse IDE release, the commercial tool chain and IDE vendors are constantly changing the environment too. For any ARM Cortex-M development, the combination of Eclipse with the GNU tool chain provided by ARM Inc. is the golden standard. But this does not mean that things can be easily moved from one IDE package to another.

While moving between Eclipse versions and GNU versions is usually not a big deal at all, moving between the Eclipse build tool integration is usually not simple. While the GNU MCU Eclipse plugins are widely used (see Breathing with Oxygen: DIY ARM Cortex-M C/C++ IDE and Toolchain with Eclipse Oxygen), the Eclipse based IDEs from the silicon vendors or commercial Eclipse toolchain vendors are using  their own GNU toolchain integration. Which means the project files are not compatible :-(.

NXP FRDM-KW41Z Board

NXP FRDM-KW41Z Board

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Tuning a Laser Cutter and Determine the Maximum Usable Laser Power

The question has been: If I buy such a 50 Watt cheap laser cutter from China, how many Watts does it really have? I have read all these stories that usually what is advertised is only the theoretical maximum I could get, and will not be realistic at all. This article is about how I tuned the machine and how much I got out of it.

Different Laser Power

Different Laser Power

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Laser Engraving for a Card Box

We are creating a new course (PRG-G) at the Lucerne University. This course teaches C programming and is part of the new curriculum in EE (Electrical Engineering). Every student will receive a microcontroller board on an extension board as give-away, in a custom card box for the board and cable. To make things a bit more exciting, why not laser engrave that box? That gives me a perfect excuse to experiment with the laser cutter 🙂

Laser Engraved Card Box

Laser Engraved Card Box

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