The mbed for FRDM-K64F firmware (http://mbed.org/handbook/Firmware-FRDM-K64F) has great potential. Unfortunately it seems that edges are still very rough: It happens very often that my FRDM-K64F board gets locked up :-(. I can see that the target CPU is constantly resetting: the red reset LED is always on:
FRDM-K64F Red Reset LED always on
Many modern microcontroller have a cool feature: Pin Muxing. What it means is that I can ‘mux’ the pins for different purposes: such as I can use a SPI or I2C pin as GPIO (General Purpose Pin) or vice versa. In an ideal world, I would be able to ‘route’ or ‘mux’ pins freely around. In practice these ‘way switches’ are more or less limited.
In “Using the Reset Button on the Freedom Board as User Button” I muxed the FRDM-KL25Z reset pin as GPIO pin. The same approach can be used for muxing the NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt) pin for the Freescale Kinetis devices. I’m showing it here how to do this with Processor Expert as this allows me to do this with a few mouse clicks.
NMI Pin Used as GPIO Pin
I have been asked this question several times:
“How can I define my own interrupt vector with Processor Expert?”
So I think it deserves a short tutorial, if more than one person is asking this ;-).
My user interrupt in the vector table
There has been a lot of new Freescale releases recently around FTF, and I’m trying to catch up. For me as a Processor Expert Lover, it is good news that there is now the new version 10.4 available. And it comes in different ways:
Microcontrollers Driver Suite v10.4
I should have known it better, and I always teach my students that they should take the environment into account. And you know what? This time it was me who missed following that rule.
But from the beginning: For the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) I brought 4 different Zumo Robots to show developing with the Freedom board and Processor Expert. Clark (thanks again, Clark!) has built and brought the Sumo Dojo, and I brought the bots:
Four Zumo Bots at FTF
I’m attending the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) in Dallas this year: As they say here: “everything is bigger in Texas”, that’s the motto of this conference ;-). The conference is packed, and I have a hard time to keep up with all the things going on. My focus is obviously everything around Eclipse and ARM microcontroller. The conference started yesterday afternoon with hands-on labs, and I was in the one were Freescale presented the new ‘Kinetis Design Studio’: a free of charge/unlimited Eclipse tool chain based on Eclipse Kepler, GCC and GDB. Freescale presented their new software library ‘Kinetis SDK’. And: There is a new Freedom board which gets handed out to the attendees: the FRDM-K64F :-).
Texas Style Glass Coverage
In “IoT: FreeRTOS Down to the Micro Amps” I’m using an application with FreeRTOS to get down in micro amps low power mode. Well, nearly all or my applications are using FreeRTOS because it makes the application scalable and extensible. Still, for anyone not used to an RTOS, that might be a hard start. So here we go: how to get into the Kinetis Low Power LLS Mode *without* an RTOS.
Power Measurement
One of my embedded projects is to measure the running time in a sports event (see “Sports Timing System in a Lunch Box“). The recorded time is stored in an EEPROM plus sent over USB or wireless connection to the host. It would be great if I could print out the time and ranking directly, so if there is no PC, the system can be small and tiny. So here is my next project and tutorial: Printing with the Freedom board!
Hello World on the Printer with FRDM-KL25Z
Using Processor Expert is an awesome tool: it generates source code for me, and I can can ‘dynamically’ tune my projects to my needs. Still, sometimes it is better or desirable to have a ‘normal’ or ‘static’ project. This is very well possible with Processor Expert (see “Sneaking from Processor Expert” or “Disable my Code Generation“): I can generate the code one time, and then use it without Processor Expert.
To make this even easier, I have added an option to the FreeRTOS Processor Expert component to generate ‘static’ code I can copy-paste to projects and tool chains which are either not supported by Processor Expert, or just for ‘static’ projects.
FreeRTOS Custom Port Settings
Naturally, I have several project ideas lingering around. No time to make them all (for now). One of it is interfacing the Raspberry Pi camera with a microcontroller. To store the images, I need plenty of RAM on the device, and so far the Kinetis microcontroller did not have that. Finally, Freescale announced the K64F120 a few months back, and my ordered TWR-K64F120M board arrived on my desk, waiting to be used: Finally I get an ARM Cortex-M4F with 1 MByte of FLASH and 256 KByte of RAM :-).
TWR-K64F120M Box
MCU on Eclipse 