Thank you for all your comments!

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Wordpress Dashboard

WordPress Dashboard

I did not realize that the number of comments passed the 10k number 🙂

I want to pause for a minute and thank all my readers and commenters for all the feedback, suggestions, thoughts and learning material you provide with your comments.

Thank you all, and keep Commenting 🙂

PS: You might notice the amount of spam comments. Luckly WordPress is very good in filtering these out :-). But in case your comment somehow does not get through, contact me on the email address listed in the About page.

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

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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

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

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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

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Removing Hidden COM & LPT Ports and Devices on Windows

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These days machines do not have physical serial (COM) ports any more. I do not understand why the USB group had missed to define a clean serial communication standard :-(. And the same mistake gets repeated for BLE again 😦 :-(. So every vendor and provider has its own USB CDC driver and interface. And it is really a big pain of the virtual COM/USB CDC ports installed. I have seen countless cases where “the USB UART or CDC port does not work”. So if you have such a problem, I might have a tip for you: Show hidden devices in the Windows Device manager. But in a special way I had not thought about it!

Where are the hidden devices

Where are the hidden devices?

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

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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

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

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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

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Improve Eclipse Performance with Increased Heap Size

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I noticed that especially working with several projects in my workspace, Eclipse got sluggish and slowly responding. I have in Eclipse the Heap Monitor/Status enabled (see “Show Heap Status in Eclipse“):

Heap Status at the Limit

Heap Status at the Limit

So the used heap of the Java VM is hitting a limit of about 500 MByte, and seems to be trashing around? How to increase that heap size?

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To write a program using KDS with Kinetis SDK!!

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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

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FRDM K64F Data Logger using FatFs with KSDK 1.2.0

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Check out the article by Wesley Hunter about how to use the FRDM-K64F as a data logger. He describes all the steps how to use the Kinetis SDK v1.2.0 with FatFS.

Happy Logging 🙂

Centaurian's avatarCentaurian

This blog is a guide on how to setup using the FatFs library included with the Kinetis SDK 1.2.0 using mostly the Processor expert within Eclipse Luna. FatFs is a generic FAT file system module for small embedded systems written by Chan. I prefer to use Processor Expert when possible as this will often generate code that is smaller in size than using the KSDK library files direct. I experienced many gotcha’s and complication setting this up and wanted to share how I finally managed to get it to work.

  1. Prerequisites
  2. Create New Project
  3. Open Processor Expert
  4. Add SD card component
  5. Add Init_Port component
  6. Add GPIO component
  7. Configure the clock
  8. Import FatFs
  9. Add Card detection code
  10. FAT file appender function
  11. Disable the MPU

Prerequisites

Before you begin please make sure your development environment is setup and you can already compile and debug code using KSDK 1.2.0 on Eclipse Luna…

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Unboxing the Freescale FRDM-KL43Z Board

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I’m preparing for the next semester at the university starting in September this year. As part of that, I’m currently evaluating the Freescale Kinetis FRDM-KL43Z board:

FRDM-KL43Z Board Unpacked

FRDM-KL43Z Board Unpacked

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