Books or tutorials on KDS/Kinetis?

[angelsix]

I've got the chips, programmer and software all installed and ready to go.

However, I can find zero documentation on doing anything at all with the Kinetis chips. No guide on physically connecting a programmer to program the chips, what pins to use, what settings to define. No information on basic flashing of an LED or pressing a button, or anything at all about even using KDS beyond installing it and opening a pre-existing project.

Where are the books, guides, tutorials... anything on even using these?

I come from using Freescale processors, many PIC chips, Arduinos, Rasp Pi's etc.. so have quite a bit of knowledge in hardware and a lot in software. However, I can't get far with zero documentation.

I've read the full datasheet, all tech notes and errata's, manuals. None of them give any information on the above. They just give high level information about functions, yet no details on actually implementing them in KDS or anything else, or how to program them.

[BlackNight · Accepted solution]

A few links:

Books: Books! | MCU on Eclipse

NXP community documents: Kinetis Design Studio

One recent tutorial: Tutorial: FreeRTOS Projects with Kinetis SDK V1.3 and the SDK Project Generator | MCU on Eclipse

KDS tag: KDS | MCU on Eclipse

(or google for "mcuoneclipse tutorial" and it should give you a set of links too) :-)

And don't miss to check out the excellent information on the uTasker project page: Welcome to the homepage of the µTasker operating system with integrated TCP/IP stack, USB and target...

I hope this helps,

Erich

[angelsix]

Ok I stand corrected. I've read all 3 books. The The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex M0+ processors gives you great info on ARM and setting up different IDEs like Keil and IAR. However, the furthest it gets yet again is flashing an LED. Then thats it.

So still, after all documetation, datasheets, and all links provided above, the best I can get explanations and do on the board is flash an LED.

I cant even read a button, read an analog value, PWM, sleep or anything. No information anywhere on doing any of it.

The example codes in the SDK have over 1000 lines of random nonsense code that could do anything at all, and has no explanation or code comments whatsoever on what it does. So opening an example on flashing an LED is even difficult to figure out what parts set the ports, toggle the input and output and so on. More complex examples you have no hope of reverse engineering it.

So I'm back to my original issue. How/where do you learn how to do anything with ARM MCUs?

My initial goal would be to be able to read an analog value from 2 pins, get an interrupt when a button is pressed, and put the device into deep sleep waking up from a button press interrupt. I'm using the KL03 chips.

[angelsix]

Update: I found the most useful document so far. A reference manual

http://www.nxp.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/KL03P24M48SF0RM.pdf

This so far has provided more information than every other book, document and tutorial so far.

[angelsix]

Thanks. Of the above again almost all of them just go through pre-defined steps to run generators or getting existing code, not explaining anything about the code, just how to get it auto-generated or copied from some library or example code. If I wanted to reverse engineer example code to figure things out I wouldnt need to read a book or tutorial, but it would just be a very slow learning curve for no good reason.

The books look promising. I purchased 3 of them, 2 are aweful and again just like all other documentation, just cut/copy/paste code from websites with no explanations, or running through a wizard to auto generate some code with no explanation as to what a single line of the code even does.

I like to know why things are what they are and take something from ground up understanding every line of code. With PICs, processors, and all other platforms I've used, I can easily find the documents that detail configuring and running the MCU or processor, how to control and define registers, interrupts, timers, interfaces and so on. With ARM it seems the documentation is very poor (I read that was the case before even purchasing anything but didnt realise it was this bad).

Out of all the negative though, it does look like the "The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex M0+ processors" is going to actually explain something, so I'm reading through that now. Once I get the basic knowledge and get some momentum the rest will be easy.