Category Archives: Manya’s Diary

Manya’s journey in the embedded world as intern at Freescale.

Thanks to Erich and FRDM-K64F!! :)

Posted on by
5

It has been a long time since I wrote my last blog. I really want to apologize to you all for the delay, but I was busy with another project about the competitive analysis of Freescale with our competitors. I hope I can provide you guys later with some important findings from my research.

Well as far as my project for neopixels using FRDM-K64F is concerned, Erich wrote the wonderful tutorial for all of us to turn on the NeoMatrix. I tried my hands on that and I was indeed able to turn on the board but not in the way I wanted it to. 😦 So, it turns out that I got few LEDs turning blue or some turning green. I asked Erich about it and I got to know that it is because I screwed up with the timing signals. I was using an oscilloscope and not a logic analyzer but Erich’s recommendation was to use the Logic Analyzer. This was the result of my experiment following Erich’s tutorials.

Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 1: Hardware

IMG_1246

The Hardware

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 5: DMA

Posted on by
33

This is Part 5 of a Mini Series. In Part 4, I described how to set up the FTM (Kinetis Flex Timer Module) to generate the required waveforms used for DMA operations (see “Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 4: Timer“). In this post I describe how to use to trigger DMA (Direct To Memory) events. The goal is to drive Adafruit’s NeoPixel (WS2812B) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board:

FRDM-K64F with Adafruit NeoPixel

FRDM-K64F with Adafruit NeoPixel

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 4: Timer

Posted on by
11

This is Part 4 of a Mini Series. In Part 3, I described the software concepts (see “Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 3: Concepts“). In this post I describe how to set-up the timer to trigger later DMA operations. The goal is to drive Adafruit’s NeoPixel (WS2812B) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board:

NeoPixels with FRDM-K64F

NeoPixels with FRDM-K64F

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 3: Concepts

Posted on by
5

This is Part 3 of a Mini Series. In Part 2, I described how to set up the development tools and to debug the first project (see “Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 2: Software Tools“). Now it is time to look into the software concepts. The goal is to drive Adafruit’s NeoPixel (WS2812B) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board:

Adafruit 8x8 NeoPixel Shield with Freescale FRDM-K64F Board

Adafruit 8×8 NeoPixel Shield with Freescale FRDM-K64F Board

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 2: Software Tools

Posted on by
5

This is Part 2 of a Mini Series. In Part 1, I described how to set up the hardware (see “Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 1: Hardware“). Now it is time to have the software tools ready. In this post I describe to have the IDE (Freescale Kinetis Design Studio) with the Freescale SDK installed, along with the correct firmware on the FRDM-K64F Board. The goal is to drive Adafruit’s NeoPixel (WS2812B) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board:

Freescale FRDM-K64F with NeoPixels

Freescale FRDM-K64F with NeoPixels

Continue reading →

Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 1: Hardware

Posted on by
12

This is Part 1 of a Mini Series. Manya has challenged herself to use the Adafruit NeoPixels (WS2812B RBG LEDs) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board and the Kinetis SDK (see “Let’s play with Freescale FRDM-K64F“). I did a while back that with the FRDM-KL25Z board (see “NeoShield: WS2812 RGB LED Shield with DMA and nRF24L01+“). I used Processor Expert in my project (without the Kinetis SDK), and with this setup it is very easy. However, Manya wanted to do this with the Kinetis SDK and without Processor Expert. No surprise to me, she has found out that this setup with the Kinetis SDK and without the usage of Processor Expert is much more challenging (see “Not done yet!!“). I promised to Manya to give her a helping hand, so here we go! 🙂

Adafruit 8x8 NeoPixel Shield with Freescale FRDM-K64F Board

Adafruit 8×8 NeoPixel Shield with Freescale FRDM-K64F Board

Continue reading →

To write a program using KDS with Kinetis SDK!!

Posted on by
1

Starting from the baby steps for our project seems like a good idea but not very helpful though. Learning and understanding Kinetis SDK seems like a lot of work. Meanwhile, I would like to share an important piece of information that I found on my path of working on this project. Many of you might already know, but being a first time user of Kinetis SDK 1.2.0, I found that there are few differences between Kinetis SDK 1.1.0 and Kinetis SDK 1.2.0. I was trying my hands on to use the KDS with KSDK.

So, In order to create a KDS project with Kinetis SDK, I need to create new folders, add different files and the libraries to my project. I didn’t look into all this with much detail before. I would recommend all to go through this link in order to understand using KDS with Kinetis SDK1.1.0 and Kinetis SDK 1.2.0.

This is how it looks after you have added everything:

Project Explorer view

Project Explorer view

  Continue reading →

Not done yet!! :P

Posted on by
15

Hi again to all the amazing readers of this blog! Well guess what, I am still stuck with the programming code of my NeoMatrix Demo. I think it all started with a bad choice of importing the program and libraries from the mbed to KDS. 😦

You can refer to https://mbed.org/ for other programs if you guys want to try.

Well in my last blog I told you about importing the projects and then building them. Well that was what I was trying to do but it turns out that it is not a good idea. I still have a compilation error which is there probably because of a missing assembly. Debugging the code can sometimes be really frustrating for me.  😐 So, I have decided to start from the scratch and write the code in Kinetis Design studio with the help of the Kinetis SDK. There is already the gpio example for FRDM-K64F available under the driver examples folder in KSDK_1.2.0

b7f1 Continue reading →

How to use Kinetis Design Studio!!

Posted on by
16

Getting the hands on an embedded project has always been exciting for me. So, here I am again with my blog trying to provide you with an easy to use guide for the Kinetis Design Studio 3.0.0 (KDS_3.0.0). Well, as you all know I am an intern at Freescale working for the first time on KDS, I will tell you what all we can do to start working on it with a perspective of a novice. But personally I feel KDS is one of the most encouraging IDE you can work on. So how do I start with my code for our NeoMatrix board? I am currently working with one of the demo codes for the NeoMatrix:

https://mcuoneclipse.com/2015/07/10/lets-play-with-freescale-frdm-k64f/

So, my first task is to write the code in KDS for the NeoMatrix_Demo. How do I do that? After opening the KDS 3.0.0, I need to go to File and select New and then Kinetis Project. You can see that the New Kinetis Project wizard appears once you click the File>New> Kinetis Project. Type a name and click next.

b6f10 Continue reading →

Learning about Kinetis SDK!!:)

Posted on by
1

We all know that for an application to develop, for a project to work we need hardware along with the software.  So here we are with our FRDM-K64F development boards, but the question is-how to make them work? I wrote in my second blog about the new getting started process by Freescale for the FRDM-K64F: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=FRDM-K64F&tab=In-Depth_Tab

This link gives me the opportunity to download the very helpful Kinetis Software Development Kit (SDK) along with the Integrated Development Environment which includes the toolchain Kinetis Design Studio. Let us talk a bit about the Kinetis SDK in this blog. So what does Kinetis SDK is responsible for? In simple terms, it is just software framework which helps us in developing applications across all Kinetis Microcontrollers. It is a package of pre-written code that developers can re-use in order to minimize the amount of unique code that they need to develop themselves.

Continue reading →