Bricking and Recovering OpenSDA Boards in Windows 8 and 10

Getting a board from a distributor like Farnell/Element14/Mouser (add your own distributor) means that chances are high that the default firmware on it is written years from now because the inventory has not been updated, or because boards are still produced with that original firmware (because of testing?). So what happens if I use board with a firmware developed pre-Windows 8/10 area?

Freshly Unboxed NXP FRDM-KL25Z Board

Freshly Unboxed NXP FRDM-KL25Z Board

It might work, but chances are high that the bootloader and firmware is not ready for the ‘modern age’, and as a result the board might be bricked. If you still have a Windows 7 machine around (I do!), you are lucky. If not, then you need to read this article….

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Kinetis Unique Identification Register

For my RNet stack I need a way to identify nodes in the network using a unique address. What I need is Media-Access (MAC) address. Base on such a unique address I can assign short addresses (e.g. with a DHCP or similar protocol to automatically assign shorter network addresses). So how to uniquely identify my network nodes?

The Freescale Kinetis microcontroller have nice feature: they have a Unique Identification Register (UID) which would be a perfect fit for a MAC address :-).

UID Output

UID Output

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USB with the TWR-K60F120M and TWR-K70F120M

If you read my posts, then you probably know: I *love* the FRDM boards! But: Freescale has only the lower-end processors available with a FRDM board (yet?). As I need something more powerful for my Raspberry Pi Camera project, I’m using Tower boards instead. This gives me an ARM Cortex-M4 with 120 MHz, Floating Point unit plus 128 KByte SRAM :-).

For that project I need USB. So this post is about using the TWR-K60F120M and TWR-K70F120M with USB connectivity, using the USB CDC device class as example. Initially I thought I can do as easily with the FRDM boards. It turned out, that things are not that easy.

Freescale TWR-K70F120M Tower Board

Freescale TWR-K70F120M Tower Board

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