I’m not much monitoring what is happening on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, only for time reasons, but maybe I should? For a while I’m looking for the next level for the tinyK20 project: better and more powerful microcontroller with touch display/graphic LCD. And when I see a Freescale/NXP Kinetis microcontroller on a crowd funding platform like this one, I hardly can resist 😉 :
Blaze Board (Source: http://kck.st/1S0HyUp)
The tinyK20 boards are now used in several projects. Initially I was considering a commercial USB thumb drive enclosure for it. But this needed some tweaking of the enclosure so at the end it was not ideal. 3D printing is probably that hot topic for 2016. So why 3D printing an enclosure for that board?
3D Printed Enclosure for the tinyK20 board
In many of my embedded projects I’m using successfully the Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ (see “Tutorial: Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board“) and the HC-06 Bluetooth transceivers (see “Getting Bluetooth Working with JY-MCU BT_BOARD V1.06“) for wireless communication. However, the nRF24L01+ is using a proprietary protocol, and the HC-06 does not work with Apple products (it does very well with Android devices). To close that gap I decided to add Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE, or Bluetooth 4.x). So this post is about how to add Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to NXP (formerly Freescale) Kinetis devices:
BLE Enabled Kinetis
When I create a project in Eclipse (e.g. in Kinetis Design Studio with the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins), I have to specify the name of the project during creation time:
Project Name in Eclipse
But what if I change my mind later on and want to use a different name? How to rename the project?
For my home automation project with openHAB I want to attach Freescale (now NXP) FRDM (Freedom) boards so they can take care about the realtime aspects and to act as gateways to my other systems. One way is to use USB CDC (Serial over USB) as communication channel. USB has the advantage that it powers the board, plus I can attach multiple devices: up to four on the Raspberry Pi 2 and even more with using a USB hub. In a standard configuration with a USB WiFi and a USB HID (mouse plus keyboard) dongle I still can attach two Freescale (ahem, NXP) Freedom boards to the Raspberry Pi:
FRDM-K22F and FRDM-K64F attached to Raspberry Pi 2
This tutorial describes how to create a Kinetis SDK V1.3 project using the Freescale project generator in Kinetis Design Studio.
project generator
When I left for the week-end, I missed to take with me my Segger J-Link debug box. I have one P&E Universal Multilink at home, but I needed a Segger J-Link to use the SystemViewer with my robot. I need that for a FreeRTOS trainig I will deliver in Poing/Germany on Monday at Avnet/Silica.
But I had a Freescale KwikStk board at home, and I did remember that I can use that board as a Segger J-Link to debug my custom hardware (see “Freescale Kinetis KwikStik (part 1)“).
Debugging Custom Board with KwikStik
It it is obvious that a new trend from the US is swapping over to Europe and probably the rest of the world: Black Friday. That is the day yesterday following Thanksgiving day in the United States. It is a ‘shopping’ day. Consequently, the stores are battling with huge discounts. And I use that to fill up my inventory for the Christmas-time projects 🙂 What caught my attention yesterday Friday was this: a Raspberry Pi Zero for US$5!!!!
Raspberry Pi Zero (Picture: Adafruit)
It’s not Christmas yet, but: For a research project I’m currently evaluating a new microcontroller where I need a bit more leg room. Right on time I saw that there is a new board available which caught my interest: The Freescale FRDM-K82F :-). Without thinking too much about it, I have ordered that board from Mouser Thursday last week and I had it in my hand today 🙂 Time to put up a quick post about it:
New Box on the table
A lot of good things happened in the last three weeks, so here is a new updated McuOnEclipse component release, with the following main improvements:
MCU on Eclipse 