Silicon Shortage and Semihosting with NXP MCUXpresso SDK on FRDM-KE02Z

The silicon shortage is still going on. While the NXP Kinetis KE devices might not be my first choice, they still seem to be available, in at least in lower quantities. This has been recognized by others, as I’m getting more and more questions and requests for the KE and KV family. This is why I un-dusted my old FRDM-KE02Z to be used with the latest MCUXpresso SDK and IDE.

FRDM-KE02Z Board

And in case you want to use that board or device with semihosting, I have you covered.

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MCUXpresso IDE 11.5.0

I’m now in the middle of the university fall semester exam season with writing exams and grading student work, and the same time the new semester courses need to be prepared. With the global silicon and board shortage, this will be again a challenge to equip all the labs with the needed infrastructure. The good thing is that there is no shortage on software and tools side of the infrastructure: NXP released last week their new flagship Eclipse based IDE: the MCUXpresso IDE 11.5.0. Time to check it out for the upcoming lectures and classes….

NXP MCUXpresso IDE Version 11.5.0

Spoiler Alert: It has a new view for FreeRTOS lovers, plus new features for energy/power measurements!

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DIY Split-Flap Display

Split-flap displays are electromechanical display devices, which were common in airports or railway stations a few years ago.Unfortunately, most of them are gone and replaced by LED displays. Why not create a DIY version of it?

2×10 Split-Flap Display
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LoRaWAN with NXP LPC55S16 and ARM Cortex-M33

LoRaWAN is getting more an more popular, both for terrestrial and increasingly with low-orbit satellite systems. The ‘Long Range’ in ‘LoRa’ makes it an ideal solution for low-power and low data rate applications. For a university research project we selected the Semtech SX1261/62 transceiver together with the NXP LPC55S16 mikrocontroller. Because the board used for that project is not available for the public (yet), I share here how you can run the LoRaWAN stack with the NXP LPC55S16-EVK.

LoRaWAN with Semtech SX126x and NXP LPC55S16
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Round MetaClockClock

It has been a while since my last MetaClockClock, and with the continued shortage of electronics on the market I had no chance to order new parts. But I still had some remaining parts, and with the modular design of the ’round’ clocks I was able to build up another one, but this time with even less than the usual minimum of 24 clocks:

So if you are up to build a MetaClockClock with less clocks, this might be the way for you.

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Upgrade to a new NXP MCUXpresso SDK

As time flies by, my projects are evolving. My lab projects get used over multiple semesters, and the MCUXpresso projects by default use the SDK version used at that time.

This is great because I do want to have control over what SDK is used. But from time to time it makes sense to upgrade a project to a newer version. In this post I’ll show how an existing project can be upgraded to use a new SDK.

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Getting a 96bit Unique ID for each Kinetis Device using MCUXpresso SDK

The NXP Kinetis devices implement a UID (Unique ID) for each device, using the ‘Unique Identification Register) which is part of the SIM (System Integration Module):

SIM Unique ID

SIM Unique ID (NXP K22P144M120SF5RM.pdf Reference Manual)

While this number should be unique, I was wondering last week why students in the labs reported the same UID for multiple robots in the lab. So maybe this number is not so unique as it should be?
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RTOS Trace: TraceX with Microsoft Azure RTOS (aka ThreadX)

Having visibility and insights into a running system is highly valuable or critical: not only for optimizations but as well to verify the system design and behavior. In Getting Started with Microsoft Azure RTOS (aka ThreadX) I showed how to quickly run Azure RTOS. This article is about getting trace out of an ThreadX application and show it in TraceX.

Azure RTOS TraceX

Azure RTOS TraceX

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Tutorial: Maximum Clock Frequency for Kinetis using MCUXpresso Clock Tools

The tinyK22 board with the NXP K22FN512 is a bread-board-friendly small board with a 8 MHz external oscillator:

tinyK22 Board

tinyK22 Board

This tutorial is about how to use the NXP MCUXpresso Clock configuration and configure the board to the maximum clock frequency of 120 MHz. The same steps apply to many other boards, including the FRDM-K22F one.

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Tutorial: MCUXpresso SDK with Linux, Part 3: RAM and XiP Code on i.MX RT1064

In my previous articles I have used the command line on Linux to build and debug NXP MCUXpresso SDK applications. In this article I’m running code on NXP i.MX RT1064 in RAM or FLASH.

i.MXRT1064 board with LPC845-BRK as debug probe

i.MXRT1064 board with LPC845-BRK as debug probe

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