Today I conclude my countdown of top reasons to use i.MX RT1010, and I wanted to end the blog series in the same way that it began – by talking about how to get started. It is has been  2 weeks since my first post, so hopefully by now you have found the $10.10 in your couch cushion to order your i.MX RT1010 EVK. Maybe you even already have the EVK on your desk and followed the instructions on the Getting Started webpage which leads you to download the software and tools. But what is MCUXpresso and how much does it cost?

Listen up everyone. We are winding down the countdown and my blog today is about audio. Many consumer products and embedded devices support various digital audio functions, and more and more engineers are looking for the MCU to support these functions, rather than needing to add a DSP or other dedicated solution.  The good news is that many MCUs now have the capabilities to support these basic audio tasks. But how do you choose an MCU that will give your product the price, performance, and design flexibility you need?

So you want to add a display to your product? You look at the i.MX RT series table and see that the i.MX RT1010 device does not have an LCD interface, so you immediately write it off. Not so fast!  Did you know that you can add a display to your i.MX RT1010 design through the I2C module? What’s great about the i.MX RT1010 is that we didn’t skimp on peripherals to hit that $1 price point. Even the pin muxing takes into account maximum usability for a variety of applications. But say you are working on a thermostat application and need the I2C module to connect to a variety of sensors instead. Based on yesterday’s blog, hopefully you immediately think of the FlexIO module.

Say for example, you are working on your industrial application using the i.MX RT1010 MCU and have everything designed out. You are using two UARTs for sensor interfaces, one UART for camera, and the fourth UART will be used for development and future debug. Then, your product marketer comes by and asks you to add Bluetooth to the product.

What can you do?  The i.MX RT1010 only supports 4 UARTs. Do you move to an i.MX RT1050 MCU since it has 8 UARTs? Do you add another external UART to your design?

Don’t fret! FlexIO to the rescue!

All engineers – and most anyone – love to make things spin, right? That explains the revenue made on those fidget spinners. The inventor is a genius! OK ok … now back to MCUs … the i.MX RT MCU motor control demos are some of the most highly viewed demos. So what makes the i.MX RT1010 device ideal for motor control applications? Is it the FlexPWM? The ADC? Or just the raw performance of this 500 MHz MCU? The answer – all of the above.  The i.MX RT1010 MCU is an ideal solution for a single motor and here’s why

On what could be perceived as a low-cost MCU, it is nice to see that security was not compromised on the i.MX RT1010 device. In fact, the i.MX RT1010 MCU has the same security block that exists on many of the other i.MX RT products.

For today's blog, I am going to keep it short and direct it to the PCB layout engineers out there.  The i.MX RT1010 MCU designers want you to know that the utmost care was taken when designing the i.MX RT1010 device. Even if your company typically prioritizes product requirements over package requirements, NXP has you covered. During our package development, we do a number of pin-out iterations and a fanout exercise to make sure that the i.MX RT LQFP packages are easily laid out for 2-layer through-hole PCBs. 

Continuing with my countdown of top reasons to use i.MX RT1010 crossover MCU, today I want to talk about performance.  The performance of the i.MX RT series really pushes this portfolio to a classification of its own – crossover MCUs. Engineers can now enjoy the level of performance historically seen in the processor space, now in the MCU world – providing tremendous familiarity and usability for engineers. But just ask the rabbit from the Tortoise and the Hare fable, sometimes it is not enough just to be fast. You have to be smart too. Within the i.MX RT1010 family, several smart features are coupled together with the 500 MHz Arm® Cortex®-M7 core.

Continuing with my 10-day countdown to top reasons to consider the i.MX RT1010, today we look at reason #9 -the unlimited memory capabilities of the i.MX RT1010.

Looking at the i.MX RT1010 crossover MCU, one might notice that there is no on-chip Flash memory. Where do you boot from? Where do you store your code? And is it safe? What about latency issues? The i.MX RT1010 MCU was designed to ensure maximum memory flexibility, while not sacrificing performance or security.

As explained in my blog yesterday, for the next 10 days, I will countdown 10 top reasons to consider the i.MX RT1010 for your next design.  Today we start with reason #10 -the EVK.  Since the first i.MX RT crossover MCU first launched in 2017, the EVK has been the board of choice for developers. Right-sized with the right level of features and capabilities

Though not widely publicized, the $1 price point of the newly announced i.MX RT1010 crossover MCU made me pause. My parents always told me that a dollar is not what it used to be, meaning that the value of a dollar today does not go nearly as far as it used to for them when they were growing up.

With the cost of an single pin, many ARM Cortex-M boards including the NXP i.MX RT1064 can produde SWO data: think about a pin able to stream data out of the chip in realtime.

In my previous articles I have used the command line on Linux to build and debug NXP MCUXpresso SDK applications. In this article I'm running code on NXP i.MX RT1064 in RAM or FLASH.

The way in which people digest information is changing, as more distractions lead way to shorter attention spans and multi-tasking becomes even more important.  The new training series from NXP, i.MX RT Tech Minute, is intended to address this.  The need for technical information present in things like webinars, applications notes, white papers, etc. is important.  But what if you do not even know which topic you are interested in?  How do you know where to get started?

As a marketer, I never like to use the suffix “less” as it usually has a negative connotation.  “Less” means not having; without; free from something. Words like hopeless, motionless, and helpless come to mind.  So, when a system architect recently spoke to me about the products in the i.MX RT series and referred to them as being flashless, I cringed a little.

But, is being flashless such a bad thing?  Yes, it means it has no flash memory on-chip, but that is actually giving customers more - More opportunity for differentiated on-chip peripherals.  More options for selecting the perfect memory.  And more opportunity to create cost competitive solutions.

The following article is a step-by-step tutorial how to use the NXP MCUXpresso SDK & IDE to create a SD card bootable image on i.MX RT. It features the i.MX RT1050-EVK(B) but is with minor changes applicable to any other i.MX RT device

Updated v1.02  1st March 2019

Please find attached a document detailing various features related to using the iMXRT1060-EVK evaluation board with MCUXpresso IDE v10.3.x and SDK v2.5, including details of how to enable SWO trace on this MCU.

Updated to include a section on the MIMXRT1064 EVK.

New release version v1.0.1

Please find attached a document detailing various features related to using the iMXRT1020-EVK evaluation board with MCUXpresso IDE v10.2.1 and SDK v2.4.

This updated v1.0.1 version comes to fix a reported typo (Documentation Error Report ) on the SDRAM base address value. See the Revision History section on the first page of the document for details.

Now updated to v201

We have updated the attached document detailing various features relating to using the iMXRT1050-EVK(B) evaluation board with MCUXpresso IDE v10.2.1 and SDK v2.4.x.