NFC Cockpit with other MCU and PN5180

[janulo]

Dear all,

according to AN11906, chapter 3.4, NFC Cockpit may be connected to other MCU on target board. 

The NFC cockpit can be used together with other microcontrollers than the LPC1769 as well. In order to achieve this, a virtual com port interface (VCOM interface) is available in source code which can be ported to any other controller. The main porting work which is required relates to the adaption of the interface Host Microcontroller <-> PC. This allows to connect the PN5180 to the application specific host microcontroller directly on the application board and connect a PC running the NFC cockpit to the application specific microcontroller. This is especially useful for fine-tuning of a register configuration without the need of additional software development.

I would like to implement this cool feature as connecting our custom board to NFC Cockpit would be very helpful for tuning. Unfortunately, our product (equipped with PN5180) does not have USB. We have only UART available (RS485, but may be changed to RS232 for debugging purposes).

So my questions are:

• Is it possible to connect our custom board to NFC Cockpit over serial port?
• Our fw can be adjusted for this easily, but what about the PC side - customized VCOM windows / linux driver?

Thanks for any comments :smileyhappy:

[marcinbaliniak]

Hi all,

Any news about this? Is there any place to find sources for cocpit compatible firmware? We already build a product with PN5180 with build in antennas so it will be nice to have an opportunity to perform DPC calibration in our products.

Thanks,

Marcin.

[janulo]

Nothing new here, we had to implement calibration stuff into special build of our firmware.

[weidong_sun]

Hello Jan,

   unfortunately, debugging PN5180 board , only two connections are supported: USB & JTAG.  UART is not supported.

Best regards,

Weidong

[janulo]

Hi,

thank you for your reply.

I was thinking about connecting our custom reader (not NXP eval board OM2518FDK) equipped with PN5180 to NFC Cockpit. Our custom reader has only UART and debugging port SWD.

There is an option in NFC Cockpit ini file: 

;[EnforceBoardSelection]
; PN5180=COM5

It looks that NFC Cockpit is using serial port for communication, so UART on our custom reader should be fine for this. So the only thing I'm missing now is description of communication protocol used by NFC Cockpit to communicate with the board. Then we can implement this protocol in our reader and finally we will be able to use NFC Cockpit with our reader for fine-tuning.

Is description of communication protocol used by NFC Cockpit available? We have access to nxp docstore.

[shermandowell]

Having similar troubles.  Can't find any programming resource for "order of commands" on the RFID IC.  I put a spy on the cockpit output to the CLEV6630B board and ran the following commands

<Reset> 

<RF ON>

<Load protocol (default 14443A on the main page of the cockpit)>

<ACK ReQ>

I can't make much sense of the serial spied output but have attached the file for good measure.

Sample Cockpit Serial output

[pochupan]

非常有用 !