I really love tiny and bread board friendly boards, especially if they are very affordable and can be use with Eclipse based tools. So I was excited to see the NXP LPC845-BRK board to be available at Mouser, so I ended up ordering multiple boards right away. Why multiple? Because they only cost CHF 5.95 (around $6)!

NXP LPC845-BRK Board

The boards arrived yesterday, so it is a perfect timing to have them (and more of it) integrated into the next semester university course material. So you will probably see a few more tutorials for this board.

lpc845-brk boards

Unboxing

The kit comes in a solid card box with:

the LPC845-BRK board
two 10pin headers
Micro USB cable
a smalls screwdriver
two 2pin jumpers and headers
getting started reference card

lpc845-brk kit content

The board works out of the box and does not need any soldering, and the headers are provided in case I want to customize the board. I like the fact that the headers are supplied, plus I’m free what I want to solder to the board. Plus I can use different headers if I want to. I was puzzled by the screwdriver (what for?) until I realized that there is small potentiometer on the board :-).

LPC845-BRK Board

The main MCU on the board is the LPC845 in QFN48 package ( LPC845M301JBD4), an ARM Cortex-M0+, 30 MHz, 64 KB FLASH and 16 KB SRAM):

LPC84x Block Diagram (Source: NXP web site)

The board has a ‘break-apart’ touch area: if I don’t need it, I can make the board smaller. it includes a potentiometer, an RGB LED, three push buttons (Reset, user and ISP). Plus most important: the LPC11U35 acting as a debug probe:

LPC845-BRK Board Components

I can use the LPC845 with an external debug probe: for this I have to solder a jumper plus the 2×5 header. All the three buttons can be used as user buttons, so technically there are three of them. There is as well a jumper for an ammeter to measure the current used.

Software and Tools

There is no dedicated MCUXpresso SDK for that board (yet?), so I have downloaded the one for the device from http://mcuxpresso.nxp.com/:

SDK for LPC845

With drag&drop I added it to the NXP MCUXpresso IDE 10.3.0:

Installed SDK for LPC845

On the LPC845-BRK web site there is a zip file with examples which I have imported into the MCUXpresso IDE:

examples

When plugged in, the board enumerates with a virtual COM port which is a gateway to the LPC845 UART:

Virtual COM Port

I was able to debug the board out of the box, the board is recognized as CMSIS-DAP debug probe:

linkserver

And voilà: I’m debugging it 🙂

Debugging with MCUXpresso IDE

Summary

I really like that board. It is of good quality with a lot of value. It has a on-board debugger and even the possibility to use it directly with a J-Link or P&E Multilink if I wish so. The board is small, can be hooked on a bread board and can be made even smaller with removing the touch pad. The Cortex-M0+ is not the fastest and biggest MCU on the planet, but provides enough processing power for many smaller applications. I plan to follow-up with more tutorials in the next days and weeks. Until then, see the tutorials listed in the Links section below.

List of articles about the LPC845-BRK board:

Happy BRKing 🙂