I wanted to take a quick break from some of the PowerQuad articles to show off a neat library that works well with the LPC55S69.      One of the design features of the Mini-Monkey experiment was a 240x240 Pixel IPS display.     I feel that the LPC55S69 is a good fit for small, low active power embedded graphics applications.  It has quite a bit of internal SRAM to store a framebuffer and has lots of processing power to composite a scene on a small display.  In some of my previous articles,  we use this display to show static images as well as displaying time series data from a built in MEMs microphone.   I ran across a twitter user “The Performance Whisper” who had recently released a lightweight and efficient  animated GIF decoder.

NXP has released the newest versions of MCUXpresso SDK, IDE, Configuration Tools, and Secure Provisioning Tool. In addition to new product support, you will find these updates and enhanced features in the new releases.

Today, NXP announced an update to the eIQ™ Machine Learning Software Development Environment, becoming the first semiconductor vendor to implement the Glow neural network compiler for vision-, sensor- and voice-based ML applications. This new neural network compiler technology delivers unprecedented inferencing performance for NXP’s i.MX RT series of crossover MCUs.

I had some design updates for “Rev B” of my Mini-Monkey design that I wanted to get in the "queue" for testing.  For the next revision, I wanted to try PCB:NG for the board fabrication and assembly.  PCB:NG is an “on-demand” PCB assembly service focused on turnkey prototypes via simple a web interface.    The pricing looked attractive and it appeared that the Mini-Monkey fit within their standard design rules.    The Mini-Monkey design uses an NXP LPC55S69 microcontroller that is in a 0.5mm pitch VFBGA98 package.   NXP offers guidance on how to use this device with low-cost design rules and I thought this would be a great test for PCB:NG.   I had success with Rev A at Macrofab and thought I would give PCB:NG a shot.

We are pleased to announce that Config Tools for i.MX Application Processors v8 are now available.

The Config Tools for i.MX is a set of configuration tools that provide an efficient method
for evaluation and configuration of pins routing and DDR memory settings when designing
with NXP's application processors based on Arm® Cortex®-A cores, including i.MX MPUs.

We are pleased to announce that MCUXpresso Config Tools v8 are now available.

MCUXpresso Configuration Tools is a product with set of tools that help users of all levels with a Cortex-M-based MCU solution.

We are pleased to announce that MCUXpresso IDE v11.2.0 (build 4120) is now available. This is a major new version of the IDE, and contains new features, enhancements and bug fixes over the previous versions, including latest announced MCUXpresso IDE v11.1.1 .

This project was implemented by Ioana CULIC (ioana_maria.culic@upb.ro), PhD candidate at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, and Alexandru VOCHESCU (alexandru.vochescu@stud.acs.upb.ro) as part of his bachelor thesis at the Politehnica University of Bucharest. All the contributions are open source and are part of the Tock project, available on github.

In my last article, we examined a common time domain filter called the Biquad and how it could be computed using the LPC55S69 PowerQuad engine.        We will now turn our attention to another powerful component of the PowerQuad, the “Transform Engine”.      The PowerQuad transform engine can compute a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in both a power and time efficient manner leaving your main CPU cores to handle other tasks.  

In my last article,   we starting discussing the PowerQuad engine in the LPC55S69 as well as the concept of data in the “time domain”.    Using the Mini-Monkey board, we showed the function of collecting a bucket of data over time.     I chose to use a microphone as a data source as it is easy to visualize and understand.      You can now easily imagine replacing the microphone with *anything* that changes over time.     In this article we are going to look at some common algorithms for processing data in the time domain.  In particular, we will look at the “Dual Biquad IIR” engine in the LPC55S69 PowerQuad. An IIR biquad is a commonly used building block as it is possible to configure the filter for many common filtering use cases.   This article is not intended to review all of the DSP theory behind IIR filter implementations but I do want to highlight some key points and the PowerQuad implementation.

PyeIQ is written on top of eIQ ML Software Development Environment and provides a set of Python classes allowing the user to run Machine Learning applications in a simplified and efficient way without spending time on cross-compilations, deployments, or reading extensive guides.

The internal clock frequency of Kinetis chips varies due to manufacturing tolerances. A trim value is programmed into the chips to compensate for this variance and make the slow bus frequency uniform between chips.

For some inexplicable reason, this trim value is not active during debug mode. This makes developing serial and CAN applications very difficult, as the baud rates which are set are not the baud rates which are achieved. To make matters worse, if I understand the documentation correctly, the baud rate in debug mode is different from the baud rate in normal mode.

Built into the LPC55S69 is a powerful coprocessor called the “PowerQuad”.   In this article we are going to introduce the PowerQuad and some interesting use cases.   Over the next several weeks we will look at using some of the different processing elements in the PowerQuad using the “Mini-Monkey” board.   

Hi All,

This is Mini Drum Pad build in with IMXRT1015. Also it has AFE shield board which is used for capsense buttons.

IMX RT is, using SAI to play the audio file at 16KHZ. I have created 12 samples (.wav file) and the raw data is stored in the music file. Based on the capsense button press triggering the sound effect.

Speaker I used is from Boat, it has internal battery so only thing required is to feed the Aux input from IMXRT EVK.

I felt that, button sense over I2C bit slow due to that having the limitation of playing the music as faster. Anyway its just demonstration of my concept.

Have you recently been sceptical of using a contact-based access system in your office or a public place? This trait is a major concern in most places for a valid reason. An access surface in a public place is used by many individuals, which makes it a potential source for contracting the deadly Covid 19 virus. Taking this into account, iWave Systems, a leading embedded solutions provider, has successfully demonstrated an alternative solution using facial recognition technology. The solution helps customers with a zero-contact access application by using individuals' faces to authorize access to a commercial/industrial space, home/office, transportation, banking, and Government sites.

Thanks to all of you that joined the MCUXpresso training we've been providing over the last few weeks and months via our webinars. We've also been adding more training videos covering some of the items from the webinars but also some more in-depth tips and tricks - check them out, and let us know what other videos you'd like to see!

In this blog, Mark Dunnett of embeddedpro puts the LPC55S16-EVK to the test ... How fast does it go? How much current does it take?

Mark Dunnett of embeddedpro shares his first impressions about the new LPC551x/S1x MCU family - our latest addition to the LPC5500 MCU series - complete with an unboxing experience. 

Share your FreeMASTER dashboard designs, get a board!

Calling all FreeMASTER fans!

Are you an experienced FreeMASTER user who has already created custom dashboards, or are you an HTML/Javascript coder who is new to this great tool and keen to share your creative ideas? With all the possibilities that resources such as jqWidgets, Google, PrimeUI, Plotly.js combined with FreeMASTER offer for creating engaging dashboards to control and/or demo your application, we'd love you to share your creations with the NXP Community. We are giving away* 50 NXP evaluation boards (20 each of the i.MX RT1020 and LPC55S28 EVKs, and 10 of the S32K144EVB) as a thank you to those of you who are willing to share your dashboards with our community.

A FOUR-PART WEBINAR SERIES | 60 MINUTES EACH

FreeMASTER, from NXP, is a powerful real-time debugging and data visualization tool that can help you create engaging demo interfaces for your embedded application. Join NXP for this four-part on-demand training series as we’ll provide an overview of the software, it’s features, capabilities, available examples, application use cases and how to easily get started.

The Mini-Monkey is now officially “out the door”.   I just sent the files to Macrofab and can’t wait to see the result.   Before I talk a bit about Macrofab, we will look at what going to get built. A few weeks ago, I introduced a design based upon the LPC55S69 in the 7mm VFBGA98.   The goal was to show that this compact package can be used with low cost PCB/Assembly service without having to use the more expensive build specifications. The Mini-Monkey board will also be used to show off some of the neat capabilities of the PowerQuad DSP engine in future design blogs. 

Hello Folks,

I have created project for managing I2C-bus low power LED drivers build at PCA9632 chip. (with possible modification for PCA9624,PCA9635PW,PCA9685,PCA9955B,PCA9956B).

You are able to manage chip from Raspberry. (It was tested at version 3 +). Github project contains documentation, sources and binaries. Who is interested in he is also welcome for testing of functionality and cooperative feed back.

Code is written at (python3 & adafruit library) as backend and free pascal as frontend.

The purpose of this Blog is to assist new users of the AppWizard to create and run their first project. The AppWizard is a tool for creating complete and ready-to-use emWin applications. The tool makes it very easy to build an application, manage resources and even define the application’s behavior.

Managing resources of an application is also made incredibly easy since the user simply has to add their resources to the project. All of the rest is done by the AppWizard, this means the user doesn’t have to fiddle around with dozens of resource files anymore.

See new page on Confluence: https://confluence.sw.nxp.com/display/MICRCT/SDK+components+detection 

The sdk data schema and validation has been merged to SDK dev branch and sync to SDK mainline.

The schemas are located in bin\generator\sdk_generator\data\sdk_data_schema.

Now the data validation will be the first and mandatory steps for most generator cmds run. For the time being, data record which violates the schemas will be reported as “warning”, because there are many warnings, generator won’t log them into screen but recorded in stage1 yml log. Please open the stage1 yml log fix the warnings.

The Hackster Crossover Code Challenge might be over, but really, it’s just the beginning for you. Now it’s your chance to take advantage of all the ideas to jump start your next design.

In part two in this series on designing with the LPC55S69 VFBGA98 package,  I am going to show you how to use the NXP MCUXpresso SDK tools to help with physical design process.    Combining some features in MCUXpresso with my PCB tool of choice, Altium Designer, I can significantly reduce the time in the CAD process.

iWave Systems and Crank Software partnered up to support rich graphics on the powerful NXP i.MX 8 series system on modules and SBC boards. Powered by NXP i.MX8 application processors, the SOM and SBC are optimized for sophisticated real-time computing in embedded applications, and Crank Software’s UI development software, Storyboard, complements the high-performing modules with an out-of-the-box GUI experience.

New features update:

•  SDKGEN-1390The SDK yml data schema and validation task[In Progress]

The aim of this task is to provide a solution(schema + validation) for SDK data annotation and validation. It is an integral part of SDK generator solution.

We expect that with this all developers should be able to

• Figure out how to config yml data by referring schemas with some typical examples
• Read out the error log for wrong data record and fix them accordingly(Easily check and find out typos in data record).
• With correct data, there won’t be any “no xxx for nil class” related run abort.

Now that we have discussed the LPC5500 series at a high level and investigated some of the cool features,  it is time to roll up our sleeves work on some real hardware.    In this next series of articles, I want to step through a simple hardware design using the LPC55S69.   We are going to step a bit beyond the application notes and going through a simple design using Altium Designer to implement a simple project.