Sunday, May 26, 2013

Getting taste of 32bit and ARM - FRDM-KL25Z

I thought it is time to play around with ARM architecture based uControllers. The first one I wanted to lay my hands on was FRDM-KL25Z Development board from Freescale. It uses Freescale's Kinetis L Series KL2x MCUs families built on ARM® Cortex™-M0+ processor. The actual chip on the board is having the marking MKL25Z128FRDM. I ordered it through kitsnspares-element14.

The board did not have the female headers soldered and it looks like below.
I got the headers soldered so that I can connect external boards to explore the capability of this board. The beauty of this design was - it can take Arduino shields. Developer of this board took care to bring out power (5V & 3.3V) and GND signals exactly as that of Arduino so without fear we can plug in Arduino shield (that does not mean we will forget about the drive capability of on board power rails!).

I was having LCD Shield made by DFROBOT and first thing I wanted try was (I hope it is not difficult to guess)... yes it is the "hello world" program. 

What was the development environment? Again kudos to the developer of this kit. It can work with http://mbed.org/ ; this is no-nonsense online development environment/tools. Using it I started exploring the board and see below pictures.




The code developed using mbed can be saved online and the for this blog can be accessed at http://mbed.org/users/rmohan10/code/DFROBOT_LCDShield/

3 comments:

  1. hey when u buy from element 14 did they ask u any end user certification ??

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    1. i m planning to buy it, element14 costs around 1000 while another site artimelectronics.com costs 350 more.. also i came across that kitsnspares takes more time to ship..how was your experience ??

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    2. Hi Shankar,

      I bought it long time back so I don't remember exactly. But I think they did not ask anything that time. Later I bought of lot of boards the only time they asking for it is TI CC3200 Launch pad.

      Yes they take more time, generally 2-3 weeks. I think they consolidate their shipment from Singapore or UK warehouse. At time I have even seen 4-6 weeks but if takes that much time, sending a reminder to them helps.

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