CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development

Microchip Technology has announced several new tools,  expanding its Arduino compatible chipKIT platform ecosystem, based on Microchip’s 32-bit PIC32 microcontrollers (MCUs) available in  low pin count SOIC or SPDIP packages.

Digilent chipKIT DP32

Digilent’s chipKIT DP32 board features basic I/O and interface components, including a prototyping aera, user buttons, and a potentiometer. The board (part # TDGL019) costs $23.9, and should be available on May 17 at microchipDIRECT.

ChipKIT Fubarino

The chipKIT Fubarino Mini board, from a partnership between FUBAR Labs and Schmalz Haus, provides another option for Arduino-compatible development with 32-bit PIC32 MCUs, using a smaller form factor. The board is supposed to be available today for $19.95 on microchipDIRECT, but I could not find it yet.

If you don’t want/need a development board,  the company also provides PIC32MX250F128B MCU in PDIP package (28-pin) preprogrammed with chipKIT USB Bootloader.  This MCU, clocked up to 40Mhz, includes 128 KB Flash and 32 KB RAM, as well as  integrated peripherals for touch sensing, graphics, audio processing, USB and control applications. So you can just plug it into a breadboard together with other components, and start developing your own applications. This MCU (part # TCHIP-USB-MX250F128B) should be available on May 24, for $5.95 on microchipDIRECT.

You can also get the 2 development boards at a discount, if you go to the Bay Area Maker Faire on May 18 & 19, 2013. More information is available on chipKIT Community Site.

After having announced EFM32 Wonder Gecko MCU family in February, Energy Micro has just officially launched their new family of high performance, low power MCUs. These micro-controllers come with an ARM Cortex-M4 CPU with floating-point unit (FPU) and DSP instruction set that helps reduce the processing time of your application in active mode. All MCUs come with 32KB SRAM, and between 64 to 256KB flash.

Energy Micro expects their new chips to be used in applications such as gas metering, energy metering, water metering, smart metering, alarm and security systems, health and fitness applications, and industrial and home automation. One key advantage of this new MCU family is the implementation of TSMC’s eLL (Extreme Low Leakage) technology that dramatically reduces power consumption at high temperatures.

Wonder Gecko Blog Diagram (Click to Enlarge)

There top of range MCUs (EFM32WG995FXXX) feature the following specifications:

You can watch the promo video below for a short introduction of EFM32 Wonder Gecko MCUs, particularly showing the low power consumption at high temperature compared to standard solutions, and the better processing performance thanks to DSP instructions and FPU unit.

Micromint, a US based supplier of single-board computers and industrial embedded controllers, has just announced Micromint Bambino 200 and 200E single board computers powered by NXP LPC4330 dual core Cortex M4/M0 MCU @ 204Mhz. Those 2 boards support .NET Gadgeteer and mbed frameworks.

Micromint Bambino 200E Board Description

Key Features of Micromint Bambino 200:

• NXP LPC4330 Dual core ARM Cortex-M4/M0 @ 204 MHz with 264 KB SRAM.
• Storage – 4MB SPI flash
• USB – High-speed USB 2.0 device port used both as a power source and for data communications or debugging
• Misc – 2 buttons, 2 LEDs
• 5 Gadgeteer sockets
• Dimensions- 101.6 x 58.4 mm

Texas Instruments has just announced the Tiva ARM MCU platform, and specifically the Tiva C Series TM4C123x ARM Cortex-M4 MCUs, which are the first Cortex-M MCUs to be built on 65 nanometer flash process technology. The Tiva C Series TM4C123x MCUs, formerly known as Stellaris LM4F MCUs, are available now and target home, building and industrial automation.

Key features and benefits of Tiva C Series MCUs:

• MCU Core – ARM Cortex-M4 floating-point core, operating at up to 80 MHz.
• Mixed-signal applications with high-performance analog integration – 2×12-bit ADC and 3 comparators.12-bit ADC accuracy is achievable at the full 1 MSPS rating without any hardware averaging.
• On-chip connectivity options - USB (host, device and On-The-Go), UARTs, I2C, SSI/SPI, CAN, etc..
• Non-volatile storage of user interface or configuration parameters to reduce system cost – Thanks to integrated EEPROM.
• Low power -  Standby currents as low as 1.6 uA.
• Large choice of MCU RAM and storage sizes – Up to 256KB flash and 32KB SRAM.

On the software side, TI-RTOS, a real-time operating system, is available to all TI MCUS, and for applications that do not need an operating system, TivaWare for C Series MCUs is a free toolkit allowing “no OS” software development. Support is available through FAE or via E2E online community. As with its other MCUs, Texas Instruments also provides a low cost evaluation kit.

EK-TM4C123GXL Launchpad Evalkit

EK-TM4C132G LaunchPad includes:

• A TM4C123G LaunchPad Evaluation board with TM4C123GH6PM MCU (256KB Flash / 32KB SRAM)
• On-board In-Circuit Debug Interface (ICDI)
• USB Micro-B plug to USB-A plug cable
• Preloaded RGB quickstart application
• ReadMe First quick-start guide

The board is compatible with TI’s BoosterPacks should you need to extend the capabilities of the board.

The Tiva C Series TM4C123x MCUs are available now and price starts at 2.15 USD in 10K quantities. The LaunchPad kit (EK-TM4C123GXL) can be purchased on TI e-Store for $12.99 now, but you’ll need to wait 8 to 10 weeks before delivery. TI also announced Tiva C Series devices with Ethernet capabilities will be available in in the near future. Further information can be found in Tiva C Series page.

Energy Micro has recently announced the availability of the Keil RTX real-time operating system (RTOS) as part of its Simplicity Studio tool suite. The Keil RTX has been optimized for ARM Cortex-M processors to provide flexible scheduling and high-speed operation, and has been improved to enable an ultra-low power, deep-sleep mode between tasks.

Energy Micro has implemented a tickless mode in Keil RTX. This mode allows the EFM32 Cortex M3 MCUs to wake up only when needed, either at a scheduled time or on an interrupt event. This results in much lower power consumption in sleep mode compared to other SysTick implementations.

The video below shows the difference between SYSTICK mode where the system consumes about 2.7mA in active mode, and 830 uA in sleep mode to the new tickless mode where the MCU still consume the same amount of energy in Active mode, but only 1uA in sleep mode, or in other words, an 830x improvement in power consumption.

ARM Keil RTX RTOS is available for free (as in beer), and is also provided with full source code under a BSD license that is free of charge even for commercial usage. The Keil RTX implements the RTOS API of the ARM Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS). Windows users can download this RTOS via Simplicity Studio software suite, however it can’t be retrieved from Simplicity Studio in Linux (or I missed it), but you can still download the source code, documentation and samples from Energy Micro in a zip file.

Via Embedded.com

RFDuino is a tiny board, about the size of a coin, powered by Nordic nRF51822 Cortex M0 SoC including bluetooth 4.0 LE support, and software compatible with Arduino UNO and DUE board, so you can just use Arduino sketches with the board. Bluetooth allows it to communicate with your smartphone (iPhone for now, but Android support is coming) to control motors & relays, monitor sensors, turn LEDs on/off, and more.

RFDuino (Left) & RFDuino with 2 shields connected to a breadboard

Key features of RFDuino board:

• MCU – Nordic nRF51822 Cortex M0 @ 16 MHz
• Memory -  16 KB on-chip SRAM
• Storage – 256 KB on-chip Flash
• Connectivity – Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy built in MCU
• GPIO – 7 pin software configurable as digital IO, analog ADC, SPI, I2C, UART and PWM. 
  

The company currently offers several stackable shields for RFDuino including battery shields (1x AAA, 2x AAA, and CR2032 coin battery), a servo shield, a USB shield, a prototype shield and more.

RFDuino will be open source hardware, and it looks quite simple as it’s just a DIP board where RF Digital RFD51822 module has been connected. You can learn the whole design story, and get more technical details in the video below.

In order to load code unto RFduino you’ll need a USB adapter board in order to connect the board to your computer. If you want to use an existing sketch, you don’t need the USB adapter board, as they can preload a sketch on the board before shipping.

RFDuino developers are looking for funds on KickStarter. You can pledge $19 to get an RFDuino, but it’s probably a better option to pledge $39 as it includes the USB shield that allows you to program the board with any sketches. If you don’t live in the US, add $10 for shipping. If everything goes according to plans, you should receive your boards in July 2013.

Thingsquare recently released the source code for the Thingsquare Mist firmware, an ultra lightweight router software (<4 kB memory) for the Internet of Things based on open Internet standards such as IPv6, RPL (Routing Protocol for Lossy networks), and 6lowpan. Thingsquare Mist allows to connect battery-powered wireless micro-controllers to the Internet, and is currently used in applications such as smart light bulbs, connected home appliances, and connected cities.

Thingsquare Mist Architecture

The IPv6 mesh network is composted of nodes with a low power radio that communicate with the Mist router (Green), which in turn connect to the Internet and Thingsquare Cloud backend (Thingsquare Haven) to store the data, and/or receive control commands via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. The end users can then use an App to monitor, and/or control the devices remotely. Thingsquare Mist uses IETF RPL IPv6 mesh routing protocol (pronounced “ripple”) for IPv6 nodes communications.

Red-IO

Thingsquare Mist runs on several low-power wireless SoCs, standalone MCUs, as well as low-power wireless transceiver combos, and both 2.4 GHz and sub-GHz radios are supported:

• 2.4 GHz radio:
  • mist-cc2538dk based on TI CC2538 ARM Cortex M3 SoC
  • red-io based on Freescale MC13224v ARM7 SoC
• sub-GHz radio:
  • stm32l-spirit1 powered by STMicro STM32L ARM Cortex M3 MCU + SPIRIT1 radio
  • exp1120 powered by Texas Instruments MSP430f5438 MCU + CC1120 radio
  • exp1101 powered by Texas Instruments MSP430f5438 MCU + CC1101

Thingsquare Mist can run on hardware with 64 to 256 kB flash and 16 ti 32 kB RAM. The graph below shows the flash and RAM footprint (in kB) for a router configuration for both 16- and 32-bit micro-controllers. The device configuration (not shown) also runs a WebSocket client, but does without the firewall, and has a very similar footprint to the server. The operating system of the platform is Contiki, an open source OS for the Internet of Things.

Mist Router Footprint on 16-bit and 32-bit Processors