In “A Shell for the Freedom KL25Z Board” I have presented an application which implements FreeRTOS, LED’s and a shell using the UART on the KL25Z over OpenSDA. So why not adding native USB CDC to the mix? Using both the USB and CDC with the same shell?
So what I have added is that the shell runs on both the SCI (over OpenSDA) and USB CDC (with the KL25Z). For this, the FSL USB CDC software stack is now part of the project:
Shell Project with USB CDC
In my earlier tutorials “Enlightning the Freedom KL25Z Board” and “Accelerating the KL25Z Freedom Board” I have not used an RTOS. In this one I’m creating a project from scratch and run it with the open source FreeRTOS operating system, using the FRDM-KL25Z Freedom board. MCU10.3 comes with gcc, and is nicely integrated with Eclipse and CodeWarrior. With this tutorial, it is possible to get an RTOS up and running on a Kinetis device very quickly.
I have a KL25Z which has 128 KByte FLASH and 16 KByte of RAM. What I want to explore is if things could fit as well to the KL0 family where the smallest device has only 8 KByte of FLASH and 1 KByte of RAM. Can this work?
After there was an update to FreeRTOS 7.1.1 in May this year, there is now a new version V7.2.0 available. It comes with smaller fixes and enhancements, see the release notes for a comprehensive list of changes.
The 2012 London Olympics are over. And I had my own special sports event last weekend. Although not part of the Olympics, it is part of the Switzerland Central Mountain Race Championship. This is a series of mountain running challenges. And no, I did not run the race. I love the mountains, and I love hiking in the mountains, but this is definitely for the greatest athletes. Instead to run the race, I have chosen to implement and run the timing system :-).
Athletes approaching the finish line
I’m a big fan of physical UART/RS-232 ports on boards. So I was somewhat disappointed not to see a serial 9pin connector on the Freedom KL25Z board. But it is perfectly understood that for this price costs are critical, and a serial header or connector is pushing the budget for that board very likely out of the water. Still, I want serial connectivity for my applications.
Freedom Board with RGB LED
An SD (Secure Digital) Card interface is kind of standard for many applications today: it provides a lot of memory at a reasonable cost. Still, I need a software stack for it, up to the level of a file system. So far I was really happy with using FatFs: an open source FAT file system provided by Elm-Chan. I’m using the FatFs Processor Expert component already in multiple designs. What was missing: a port to the Freescale Kinetis ARM Cortex-M4 family of processors.
Yesterday was my ‘lucky day’: My Kinetis-L Freedom board arrived :-). This board is really nice and features the KL25Z from the recently announced Kinetis L Family. And guess what is the first thing I want to flash on that processor? Yep: some FreeRTOS tasks. But to get there, a few important things have to be sorted out:
When I added ‘support for ARM/Kinetis‘ to my bucket list in my Percepio+Trace post, I knew it will not be straight forward. But it was a lot harder than I thought. I had to burn many week-end hours. But finally I have Percepio Trace with FreeRTOS up and running for Kinetis and ARM Cortex-M4 with CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 :-).
Technically, a normal user component can implement any RTOS. This is what I did with the Micrium MicroC/OS-II component. That way the component shows up in the ‘Embedded Components’ group. But how to make it showing up as RTOS component inside the ‘Operating System’ group as the FreeRTOS component? What I want is this: to show the RTOS component under the ‘Operating System’ group of my project:
FreeRTOS in the Operating System Group
In my previous post I mentioned the Drivers\Common folder which has ‘include’ files. These files are maintained automatically by the Component Wizard. But what is the purpose of these files?
The Common Folder has *.inc files which are included in the driver as ‘function’ header. The .inc file contains documentation about the function and parameters for that function.
MCU on Eclipse 