Tutorial: Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board

For some time I’m using the Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ transceiver successfully in many projects (see “Tutorial: Ultra Low Cost 2.4 GHz Wireless Transceiver with the FRDM Board“). Since that tutorial things evolved a lot with the introduced RNet Stack. To honor the popularity of the Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+, Freescale has put a socket on the FRDM-K64F board. So time to make a new step-by-step tutorial how to use the nRF24L01+ with the FRDM-K64F.

Two FRDM-K64F Boards with nRF24L01+ Transceiver

Two FRDM-K64F Boards with nRF24L01+ Transceiver

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Finding Settings in Processor Expert Components

Processor Expert components are making things very easy to configure: go a component, use the component inspector and change a setting. However, with the devices getting more and more complex, the list of settings or properties get longer and longer. To the point that it is hard to find a setting.

For example, where are the settings for the PLL in the CPU component?

Component with Settings

Component with Settings

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Tutorial: DIY Kinetis SDK Project with Eclipse – Board Configuration

In “Tutorial: DIY Kinetis SDK Project with Eclipse – Startup” I showed how to create a Kinetis SDK project from scratch. In this post it is about adding the board initialization files. With the board initialization the peripheral clocks and pin muxing is configured.

MK64FN1M0VLL12 on FRDM-K64F

MK64FN1M0VLL12 on FRDM-K64F

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Switching between ‘tabs’ and ‘no-tabs’ UI in Processor Expert

Newer releases of Processor Expert (e.g. in Kinetis Design Studio (KDS)) come with a ‘graphical’ (or ‘tabbed’) view of the Component Inspector. The UI elements are different and ‘tabs’ are using:

Component Inspector in Tabbed View

Component Inspector in Tabbed View

I like much more the earlier ‘no-tabs’ view. Luckily, there is a setting to switch the view back.

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Tutorial: DIY Kinetis SDK Project with Eclipse – Startup

This is the start of a multi-post tutorial about the Freescale Kinetis SDK, released back in April as beta version. The SDK a set of peripheral drivers, and will become the standard software foundation and drivers provided by Freescale for their ARM Cortex based devices. Similar what other vendors already do. While this is a good step, it is the same time very disruptive for my university projects with new Freescale Cortex-M devices. And with everything new (and beta), it needs time to learn. So this post is about creating a Do-It-Yourself Kinetis SDK project from scratch for Eclipse. This part is about the startup code: about everything to get the application started.

FRDM-K64F with SD, nRF24L01+ and HC-06 Bluetooth

FRDM-K64F with SD, nRF24L01+ and HC-06 Bluetooth

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EmbSys Registers View with CMSIS-SVD dimElementGroup

As outlined in “How to Add Register Details View in Eclipse“, I have a nice register detail level viewer for Eclipse and GDB. But one problem showed up: there were entries showing with %s:

PCR Register with %s

PCR Register with %s

The reason is that the parser is not handling the dimElementGroup of CMSIS-SVD.

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Tutorial: PWM with DMA on ARM/Kinetis

For a project I need to change the PWM duty cycle after a PWM period is over. One way to do this is to have an interrupt at the end of the PWM period, and then set the new PWM duty (compare) register value in the interrupt. That works fine for ‘slow’ PWM frequencies, but if the PWM frequency is high, the CPU load is massively increasing. A better way is to use DMA (Direct Memory Access).

FRDM-KL25Z with DMA PWM and Logic Analyzer

FRDM-KL25Z with DMA PWM and Logic Analyzer

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Semihosting with Kinetis Design Studio

Semihosting is a technique to do printf() debugging through an active debug connection. So instead using a physical connection like RS-232 or USB CDC, the connection to the host machine is through the debugger. This post is about enabling and using semihosting with gcc and newlib/newlib-nano in Freescale Eclipse based Kinetis Design Studio (KDS) using the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins.

Semihosting Console View with output

Semihosting Console View with output

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How to Add Register Details View in Eclipse

The standard Eclipse registers view only shows the core registers:

Standard Registers View in Eclipse

Standard Registers View in Eclipse

I think it would be great to have a view to see all the device peripheral registers too?

Embedded System Registers View

Embedded System Registers View

If you want the same, then this article is for you. It works both for stock Eclipse and Freescale Kinetis Design Studion (KDS) 🙂

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Tutorial: Data Logger with the FRDM-K64F Board

The Freescale FRDM-K64F is a great board for data logger applications: it has a powerful ARM Cortex M4F with 120 MHz, 1 MB Flash and 256 KByte RAM. Best of all: it already has a micro SD card socket on the board :-).

Data Logger with FRDM-K64F

Data Logger with FRDM-K64F

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