Introduction
This document is intended to guide you in the installation of the tools and let you know the material required for the FRDM-MCXW72 Hands On.
Required Materials
The material and the software requirements will depend on the hand on, but the next is what it is required in most of them.
Hardware Requirements
- FRDM-MCXW72 Board
- Personal Computer
- Type C USB Cable
Software Requirements
- IDE: Visual Studio Code 1.107.1 or later
- SDK: v25.12.00
- MCUXpresso extension for VS Code version v25.12.48
- BLHost Tool or LinkFlash tool (Linkflash is included with LinkServer installation)
- Windows OS (It was used Windows 11 for this hands-on)
- NXP IoT Toolbox (For an Android or iOS device)
- Serial Terminal program, like PuTTY or Tera Term
Environment Setup
Note: In order to make downloads in NXP website, it is necessary to have an account. Register and log-in for moving forward.
MCUXpresso for Visual Studio Code
MCUXpresso for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) provides an optimized embedded developer experience for code editing and development. The extension enables NXP developers to use one of the most popular embedded editor tools and provides an easy and fast way to create, build and debug applications based on MCUXpresso SDK or Zephyr projects.
Install it following the next steps:
- Download Visual Studio Code from Microsoft Store or visual studio code web page Download Visual Studio Code - Mac, Linux, Windows
- Access to vscode for MCUX wiki and download MCUXpresso Installer Dependency Installation · nxp-mcuxpresso/vscode-for-mcux Wiki · GitHub
- Run MCUXpresso Installer and for MCXW72 Hands On install at least
- MCUXpresso SDK Developer
- Matter Developer
- Arm GNU Toolchain
- Standalone Toolchain Add ons
- Linkserver
- PEmicro
Installing the FRDM-MCXW72 SDK V25.12.00
Each MCU has its own SDK that includes driver, examples, middleware, docs and other components. To get and build the demo, let’s install the SDK into VS Code.
Install the NXP’s GitHub SDK:
- Once MCUXpresso for Visual Studio Code is installed, open VS Code.
- Go to MCUXpresso for VS Code extension that is on the tools column at the left.
- Look for INSTALLED REPOSITORIES option and press ‘+’ (Detail steps are described in wiki page. Working with MCUXpresso SDK · nxp-mcuxpresso/vscode-for-mcux Wiki · GitHub).
- Search for the remote option of the Import Repository window.
- Select the MCUXpresso SDK in the repository option to download the GitHub SDK, then in the Revision tab you can select either the “main” revision (which corresponds to the latest version available) or to select an specific version (we’ll be using version v25.12.00 for these series of labs), optionally you can change the repository name and location.
- Finally click on the “Import” button.
Blhost Installation
The blhost application is used on a host computer to issue commands to an NXP platform running an implementation of the MCU bootloader. The blhost application with the MCU bootloader, allows a user to program a firmware application onto the MCU device without a programming tool. Please go an download the tool in the next path and make sure to placed in a known location.
