The MCX N microcontroller family includes an eIQ Neutron N1-16 NPU for accelerating neural network models. The FRDM-MCXN947 development board can be combined with a camera and LCD screen to showcase running TinyML vision models on a microcontroller.
MCX N Camera Hardware Setup:
The following hardware is used:
- MCX N FRDM Development Board - FRDM-MCXN947
- OV7670 camera (with optional wide-angle lens)
- NXP LCD-PAR-S035
There are three small modifications needed for the FRDM-MCXN947 board for camera support. Without this modification the camera colors will be incorrect and tinted red.
- Change SJ16, SJ26, and SJ27 found on the back of the Rev B board to connect pin 3 (the dashed side) so that it looks like the following:
Then connect the camera and LCD to the FRDM-MCXN947:
- Plug in the OV7670 camera into J11. It should line up with the orange box.
- Connect the LCD-PAR-S035 LCD into J12. It should be flush with the bottom so that the top 2 rows of pins are left hanging off the edge. Also note that on some LCD-PAR-S035 boards those top two rows of pins are not installed.
- It should look like the following when complete
Also as the camera and Ethernet pins are shared, if you need to use the Ethernet+Camera at the same time please see this NXP Community post.
MCX N Vision ML Examples:
The NXP Application Code Hub contains several vision AI/ML examples:
There are also Multimedia Processing Pipeline (MPP) examples inside the MCX N MCUXpresso SDK that demonstrate more examples of using vision AI/ML on MCX N. These examples are only available for VSCode/GCC in the Repository-Layout SDK package.
Note: It is recommended to use MCUXpresso SDK 25.09 for these examples. The MPP issues in the 25.12 and 26.03 MCUXpresso SDK releases should be fixed in the upcoming MCUXpresso SDK 26.06.
MCX N ML Vision Lab:
The attached eIQ Neutron NPU for MCX N Lab Guide - Face Detect.pdf lab document walks through the steps to download an example Face Detect ML project from the NXP Application Code Hub and use the eIQ Neutron Converter tool to convert a model. It also describes how to update the eIQ and Neutron software libraries in an older MCUXpresso SDK project to work with the latest eIQ Neutron SDK libraries. It is recommended to go through the general MCX N NPU Lab Guide first and then do the attached Face Detect lab second.
