Hands-on with NXP’s MCX FRDM Boards - Workbench Wednesdays

earlier this year nxp started shipping two microcontrollers from their newer MCX line and they shipped these fdm or Freedom boards with those chips n XP and the element 14 Community sent me one of each for us to check out hello and welcome back to workbench Wednesdays my name is James let's get started [Music] [Applause] [Music] there are four processors in the MCX family in this video we are looking at the general purpose a and the more powerful n the MCX a is a single core and can run up to 96 MHz it has the general purpose interfaces you'd expect in an entry-level microcontroller the MCX N is a dual core processor with security features and faster IO ports like ethernet these chips also have a neural processing unit for accelerating Ai and machine learning tasks nxp offers both of these chips on what they call their freedom or fdm development board these boards have a variety of connectivity for example they have nxp's FRDM header an Arduino style Shield connector a socket for micrus and an unpopulated pmod Port there are two USBC connectors one connects to an onboard debugger and the other is a full-speed connection to the microcontroller the MCX in adds headers for a flex IO LCD smart dma camera can buus an ethernet port and on the back an unpopulated micro SD card footprint the board also has a temperature sensor external flash and a capacitive touchpad depending on where you buy them these boards are in the $15 to $25 range these processors are supported by nxp's MCU espresso SDK there is a standalone version extensions for VSS code and support for other thirdparty microcontroller idees personally I like using VSS code because I use it for everything now but I did run into a couple of issues so let me share what I learned in case you run into these two the vs code extension relies on an installer for the necessary dependencies while it works well it will get upset if you have any of the tools it installs already available in your path for example I kept getting errors about the wrong cmake version being installed if you run into this either install the version at once remove cmake from your path or give its version priority in your path I just ended up removing cmake from my path but there was still one more path related problem that was a little bit harder to track down I would get two different errors one about the cmake project name which seems to be a generic error and the other related to nmake not being found that was a big clue turns out I had to find inm make. Exe on my computer and then add that directory to my path variable after restarting VSS code projects started to build with no problem alternatively the eclipse based IDE incu espresso is also an option first up I ran the hello world program on the MCX a it built with no issues and I flashed it with the onboard MCU link debugger once it was flashed I resumed the debugger and opened up a Serial terminal to see the hello world message once I validated that I could talk to the board I moved to the hardware equivalent of hello world which of course is to Blink an LED there is an example in the Standalone SDK repository for the template I filtered on blink and then created the project here you can see the code used for this example like before I built and then programmed the binary with the onboard debugger and now we can see the onboard RGB LED flashing red for the last example on that board I loaded an i3c or I cubed C example it's the newer standard that is Backward Compatible with i squ c it reads the temperature from an onboard sensor when I put my finger on it the temperature goes up now moving to the MCX n blink and hello worked fine so I moved on to a touch example that makes use of the built-in pad it's a pretty simple program touching the capacitive pad causes the onboard led to light up demonstrating its RGB capability or R&B in this case next I head it over to the nxp code Hub which covers more in-depth applications for example for the MCX one demonstrates the built-in realtime clock unfortunately when trying to load this one in VSS code it generates an error with instructions to use the Standalone IDE I don't fully understand what the issue is or how to fix it was actually super weird because the MCX in examples worked fine the day before so something weird started to happen but I don't have any more time to debug these software issues anyway I think the more interesting example for this board would be the one related to machine learning and vision it seems like a good application fit for the end processor unfortunately I don't have a camera that is compatible with the board so for now this will bring my evaluation of these boards to a close overall I would have to say the boards are good quality I always like onboard debuggers versus just serial interfaces the array of connectors are useful if you have existing Hardware that you want to connect the very reasonable price points are great reasons to pick these up and consider them for your next project hey thanks for watching check the link below for show notes on the element 14 Community you'll find lots of great stuff over there if you want to see more videos from me or the other host tap or click the things on the screen for now it is time for me to get back to my electronics workbench

Channel: element14 presents

Views: 2,701

Keywords: electronics, hardware, hacking, mods, element14, maker, engineering, element14presents, NXP Controllers, NXP MCX FRDM Board, I3C protocol, Onboard debugger, Embedded programming, hardware evaluation

Id: bWE70T770mI

Length: 5min 43sec (343 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024