New pictures from the manufacturing process of the tinyK20 boards. Now all parts to be populated have been arrived at the manufacturing, so populating the boards can start soon:
tinyK20 PCB Bottom
tinyK20 Production Boards Ready for Parts
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Category Archives: CPU’s
tinyK20 Board in Manufacturing
The manufacturing of 200 tinyK20 board is progress, and I’m sharing pictures of it :-).
Rendering from CAD Tool, top side:
Top side with gold plating and mask
Overview: Processor Expert
In “Overview: From Snippets to Code Generation” I discussed several tools used in my development process. On tool which helps me a lot to get things done is Processor Expert. In this post I’ll give an overview about this tool and reasoning for the pros and cons of using it.
Processor Expert
McuOnEclipse Components: 17-Oct-2015 Release
On SourceForge I have published an update of the McuOnEclipse software components, with following major changes:
- FreeRTOS updated to version V8.2.2 which comes with TLS (Thread Local Storage) support and GDB debug helpers.
- Percepio Trace updated to V3.0.2 with the release of Segger Real Time Terminal (RTT) for continuous trace streaming.
- FSL_USB_Stack with alternate USB initialization to deal with an issue in combination with the Kinetis SDK v1.3.0
- GenericI2C and GenericSWI2C have added support for custom I2C bus handling.
McuOnEclipse SourceForge Release 2015-10-17
NVIC: Disabling Interrupts on ARM Cortex-M and the Need for a Memory Barrier Instruction
Mastering interrupts is critical to make an embedded application reentrant. The challenge with reentrancy is that things might be implemented in a wrong way and the issue might just show up sporadically (see “EnterCritical() and ExitCritical(): Why Things are Failing Badly“). The ARM Cortex interrupt controller is named NVIC (Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller).
ARM Cortex NVIC Registers
Playing Tetris with a FRDM-KL43Z Board
How about to use the Freescale FRDM-KL43Z board (see “Unboxing the Freescale FRDM-KL43Z Board“) to play a Tetris game?
Zumo Robots at Maker Faire in Rome (16. – 18. Oct. 2015)
I won’t be able to attend the Maker Faire in Rome (16. – 18. Oct. 2015). But five of the Sumo bots students from the previous semesters have built and programmed will be there.
Sumo Robots
Kinetis Drone: Sensor Fusion Toolbox
Flying a quadrocopter without some sensor and microcontroller intelligence will be a challenge. Definitely I will need some intelligent sensor data to help me out :-). Luckily, there is a Freescale ‘Sensor Fusion Toolbox’ and Library which gives me a nice start and visibility into the sensors I plan to use:
Sensor Fusion Data
SWD Debugging the FRDM-KL43Z
It is possible to use the Freescale FRDM-KL43Z to debug another board (see “Using the Freescale Freedom (FRDM-KL43Z) to Debug other Boards“). The FRDM-KL43Z has an on-board debug probe integrated, the OpenSDA. But it is easily possible to debug the board directly with a SWD debug probe like the P&E Universal Multilink or the Segger J-Link.
Debugging the FRDM-KL43Z with SWD
An Introduction to Kinetis Design Studio for Mac OS X
I don’t own a Mac computer, and I try to keep my tutorials as multi-host-platform as possible. So it is always cool to see if someone else posts a nice tutorial on a different host machine: For all Mac (and as well non Mac) users, have a look at this tutorial Nash Reilly has posted: “An Introduction to Freescale’s Kinetis Design Studio.”
It nicely explains downloading and installing KDS with the Kinetis SDK and then run a ‘hello world’ program on the hardware.
And very worthwhile to check out Nash’s other articles here too: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/author/nash-reilly
Happy Nashing 🙂
MCU on Eclipse 