Tag Archives: NXP

A Flying UAV Drone Full of Sensors

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One goal of this blog is to inspire engineers, in one way or another. And when I get reports back that things were useful, I like to share it :-).

So here is something what a team of young undergraduates (Przemyslaw Brudny, Marek Ulita, Maciej Olejnik) did for theirs Master Thesis work at the Politechnika Wroclawska, Poland: a very cool flying machine controlled by two Kinetis K66, having many sensors (on own designed boards) with a custom debug/programmer board similar to the tinyK20, developed with the NXP Kinetis Design Studio:

Plane Model

UAV (Source: Thesis of Przemyslaw Brudny)

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INTRO FS2016 Semester Closing with Robot Maze Challenge

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“Learning-by-doing” is one of the core principles of my embedded systems and robotics course at the Lucerne University. For this the students apply what they learned using a robotics platform. In earlier semesters we did a Sumo battle at the end. This time the challenge was to build a remote controller plus to add the ability to explore and solve a line maze:

maze solving robots

maze solving robots

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McuOnEclipse Components: 29-May-2016 Release

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Major changes in this new release:

  • FreeRTOS V9.0.0 with static memory allocation.
  • Shell with single character I/O function.
  • FatFS File System with extra shell commands for memory dump and file creation.
  • Segger SystemViewer library updated to V2.36a
Segger SystemViewer V2.36a

Segger SystemViewer V2.36a

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FreeRTOS V9.0.0 with Static Memory Allocation

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I’m using FreeRTOS in most of my applications. There were only a few exceptions where an RTOS has to be used in safety critical systems: there usually it is not permitted to use any dynamic memory allocation because this adds the risk that a memory allocation could fail at runtime because of memory fragmentation or memory leak. And FreeRTOS uses a dynamic memory (heap) for the task stacks and the RTOS resources including semaphore, mutex and queues.

This is now a thing of the past. This week a new FreeRTOS Version 9 was released which does not need any dynamic memory allocation anymore: it is possible now to build completely statically allocated systems with FreeRTOS :-).

Dynamic and Static Memory Allocation in FreeRTOS V9.0.0

Dynamic and Static Memory Allocation in FreeRTOS V9.0.0

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Daylight beating my Jetlag

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Air travel and especially across many time zones is no fun. I returned from the NXP FTF conference in Austin, Texas. Travelling to the west works pretty good, but travelling east is a beast.

My best tip beating timezone tiredness is to get out and tank as much sunlight as I can after. It has been a beautiful day today, I got a lot of sunlight, so here is a share of that:

Sun against Jetlag

Sun against Jetlag (click to enlarge)

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NXP FlexIO Generator for the WS2812B LED Stripe Protocol

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The challenge with the selection of a microcontroller for a project is: which one has the required number of UART, I2C, SPI? Combine this with the desired package (48pins, 64pins? LQFN?), the needed FLASH and RAM size and then even the hundreds of available microcontroller shrink to a handful only. And many times I need to make compromises: such as I need two hardware I2C, but the microcontroller matching all my other needs has only one I2C hardware. So I might end up with bit-banging the slower I2C bus. Doable, but not ideal.

What is cool that some of the newer NXP Kinetis microcontroller come with an interesting hardware: FlexIO. A peripheral hardware which allows me to implement a custom protocol, including driving WS2812B (Adafruit NeoPixel) LEDs with a FRDM-KL43Z board:

Four NeoPixels with FlexIO

Four NeoPixels with FlexIO

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NXP FTF Hands-On with FreeRTOS Task Aware Debugger

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I mentioned the hands-on sessions on FreeRTOS I do this week at NXP FTF Tech Forum in Austin in my previous post. What we are using in the session is an Eclipse plugin in Kinetis Design Studio showing all kinds of FreeRTOS information:

NXP FreeRTOS Plugin in Kinetis Design Studio

NXP FreeRTOS Plugin in Kinetis Design Studio

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Changing Heap and Stack Size for NXP Kinetis SDK V2.0 gcc Projects

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With Processor Expert projects it is very easy to change the heap and stack size: There is a setting for this in the Cpu component settings, under the ‘Build options’ tab:

Heap and Stack Size with Processor Expert

Heap and Stack Size with Processor Expert

As there is no Processor Expert in the NXP Kinetis SDK V2.0 (see “First NXP Kinetis SDK Release: SDK V2.0 with Online On-Demand Package Builder“), how to do the same in a SDK V2.0 project?

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Fix for GDB and “The system tried to join a drive to a directory on a joined drive”

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The bad thing with Eclipse and GDB is: if something is failing, then all what I get is a very cryptic error message when I launch the debugger:

The system tried to join a drive to a directory on a joined drive

The system tried to join a drive to a directory on a joined drive

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Semihosting with Eclipse and the NXP Kinetis SDK V2.0

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The world is changing, and the say is “change is good” :-). In the software and API world, change very often means that a change results into something broken. So I had battled with semihosting working on the NXP Kinetis parts, only to find out that it does not work any more with using the latest version 2.0. The semihosting output e.g. with P&E debug connection remains empty:

No Semihosting output

No Semihosting output

So how to fix this?

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