This is Part 5 of a Mini Series. In Part 4, I described how to set up the FTM (Kinetis Flex Timer Module) to generate the required waveforms used for DMA operations (see “Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 4: Timer“). In this post I describe how to use to trigger DMA (Direct To Memory) events. The goal is to drive Adafruit’s NeoPixel (WS2812B) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board:
FRDM-K64F with Adafruit NeoPixel
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
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 8×8 NeoPixel Shield with Freescale FRDM-K64F Board
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?
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
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 8×8 NeoPixel Shield with Freescale FRDM-K64F Board
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
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?
I have found several excellent tutorials created by Bheema Rao on element14: He uses many of the McuOnEclipse components, features Kinetis Design Studio/Eclipse and shows how to use the Kinetis SDK, toggling/dimming LED’s on Freescale Freedom Boards.
element14
The Kinetis Design Studio v3.0.0 comes with the GNU/GCC ARM Embedded (launchpad) version 4.8-2014-q3. End of June 2015, ARM released a new version, the 4.9-2015-q1.So why not using that newer release?
Release GCC ARM Embedded 4.9 update 2
Is that already enough to make that switch?
One new feature in CDT 8.4 or later is the ability to see the instruction opcode in the disassembly view:
Opcodes in Disassembly View
MCU on Eclipse 