I have continued to explore my two hobbies (embedded systems, and Talking About The Weather) during these weeks of lock-down. I have finally got to the point that my Weather Station project can sit on the window shelf of my office, and show me the temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure on the attached eInk display.
In this blog I’m going to focus on driving that display.
Continue readingIn an earlier tutorial I introduced using I2C with the NXP LPC55S69 on OKdo E1 board to read a Bosch BME280 environmental sensor on a Mikroe Weather Click board. The MCUXpresso Clocks, Pins and Peripheral Config tools were used to get it running. It’s all for my Weather Station project that I’ve been working on during these months of lockdown. It is starting to take shape – as you can see from the photograph:
Now I really need to start reading and writing to the BME280 sensor, and that means using the I2C driver in the lpcxpresso55s69 SDK. And so this week I’ll provide a forensic examination of the most commonly-used I2C function call.
Continue readingI want to share with you a little embedded trick that I use to improve the reliability of my code. And in addition to improving reliability, the technique can be used to schedule any event to occur ‘sometime in the future’. It uses the MicroTick (UTICK) timer found on the NXP LPC55S69 microcontroller, and could be applied to any device with a simple timer.
The MicroTick timer is an elegant, thing of beauty. But there is not a driver example built into the lpcxpresso55s69 SDK, and I believe that the timer is not widely used. That means we need a tutorial!
Continue readingI selected the Bosch BME280 environmental sensor as the heart of my OKdo E1-based weather station. It is convenient to use, and I can prototype with the Mikroe Weather Click board MIKROE-1978. But the sensor is accessed over I2C, and that is my least favourite of the communication interfaces. In this short tutorial, I show you how the MCUXpresso Config tools (Pins, Clocks, Peripherals) are used to set up the I2C driver from the MCUXpresso lpcxpresso55S69 SDK. And very quickly, I am able to communicate with the BME280 sensor.
Or… MCUXpresso Clocks Configuration tutorial using OKdo E1 board.
This week I’m sharing my experience “getting started” with the OKdo E1 board. This board, featuring the NXP LPC55S69 150 MHz, dual Cortex M33 core microcontroller was a joy to use. OKdo have provided an online Getting Started guide, and I’ve field-tested this for you. My video tutorial recorded as I follow the guide is less than 7 minutes long… it may take you a little longer if you need to download MCUXpresso IDE or the lpcxpresso55s69 Software Development Kit (SDK) but I am confident that you will quickly have the board up-and-running.
Continue readingI spend a lot of my time writing software to run on manufacturers’ evaluation (or development) boards. Here on Erich’s site, my blogs have been based on Cortex M33, using NXP’s LPC55S69-EVK and LPC55S16-EVK. Development boards are great – firstly you know that the suppliers’ software should run without issues, and secondly: many of the pin functions are brought out to headers, transceivers, codecs, switches and LEDs. So, whilst it is easy to get started, by definition the boards can be large physically, power hungry, and expensive.
What do you do if you need to embed a high performance microcontroller into your prototype or small production run and don’t have time (or the inclination) to spin out a PCB?
The answer is the OKdo E1 board, based on NXP’s LPC55S69 Cortex-M33 microcontroller.
Continue readingI will always take the same approach when I receive a new embedded board: firstly I want to see how quickly I can get it up-and-running, then I want to see what it does “out-of-the-box” and finally I want to find out if the board is “useful”. Does it have some features that will inspire me for new projects??
The NXP LPC55S16-EVK has some great features – CAN-FD, dual USB and a high performance Cortex M33 microcontroller, running at 150 MHz. I have an idea to use the LPC55xx series as the basis for a Weather Station. But this is only feasible if the chip has a low power consumption and can run for weeks on a small battery.
Time to run some test code and get my digital multimeter out…
Continue readingHi, this is Mark from embeddedpro in the United Kingdom and I’m back with more videos and blogs. In the next few weeks there are two new Cortex M33 development boards becoming available. I’ll blog about my first impressions of the boards, and what I’ve been doing with them. I want my blogs give you some tips, hints and ideas about things that you can do: let me know in the Comments below.
For this last blog in the series Investigating ARM Cortex® M33 core I decided to explore the expansion features of the LPC55S69-EVK. This board has three expansion ports (PMOD, Arduino Duo, Mikroe click) and I picked the Mikroe expansion port. Why? Only because I had good experience with these boards with the Hexiwear project.
And because I have been doing some work this month with AWS IOT I wanted to get my LPC55S69-EVK onto my office WiFi network for the Christmas holidays. I know that the MCUXpresso SDK for lpcxpresso55s69 version 2.6.3 has a built-in WiFi example named qca_demo, and so that is what I am investigating today.
That WiFi example supports three WiFi shield boards, and I picked the Mikroe WiFi 10 click board. It’s part number MIKROE-3432 and available from all of the usual catalogue distributors.
MCU on Eclipse 