The next generation of machine interfaces is here. As embedded technology evolves, NXP continues to innovate with technologies like cloud-based/local voice control and face recognition for secure access/authentication. Resources for these technologies are abundant, but how can NXP continue to offer an efficient, easy, and quick path to development for people who do not want to reinvent the wheel? How do we make it easier to innovate?

Enter NXP’s turnkey, production-grade IoT ML/AI edge computing solutions. NXP provides the option of an integrated approach to development, with solutions that include out-of-box hardware, software, schematics, layouts, documentation, certifications, and BOMs to enable developers to add sensor-based capabilities into their design easily and quickly. The advantage is a faster time to market with the ability to leverage popular services like the Alexa Voice Service for AWS IoT Core Integration or compute completely offline when it comes to face recognition, for instance. 

A lot of discussion recently has been around the i.MX RT1010 crossover MCU -and why not?  It is the latest and greatest achievement for high-end crossover MCUs.  But, you probably noticed that the i.MX RT1010 MCU left off some features in order to keep the cost low.  So, what if you need a high performance MCU with all the bells and whistles?

The LPC5500 MCU series, world’s first Arm® Cortex®-M33 based MCU series for the mass market, has introduced new levels of performance efficiency, advanced security and functionality in the MCU space. With up to 150Mhz of core frequency (dual-core options included), 32uA/MHz of active power consumption, and tightly couple accelerators for signal processing and cryptography, the LPC5500 MCU series has become a key player in consumer electronics, building control and automation, secure applications and Industrial IoT markets.

Launched in October, the i.MX RT1010 crossover MCU further expands NXP’s popular i.MX RT series and introduces the world to the next generation of low-cost, high-performance MCUs.

Building upon the market success and broad adoption of the Kinetis MCU portfolio, the K32 L3 MCU family leverages the combination of high-efficiency and low-power capabilities of the Arm® Cortex®-M4 while adding another Cortex-M0+ providing new enhancements such as low-leakage power-optimized peripherals, a DC-DC converter, numerous serial communication interfaces and up to 1.25MB flash and 384KB of SRAM memory.  

Focusing on low-power and fast wake up times, the K32 L2 MCU family – based on the Arm® Cortex®-M0+ - targets power-conscious end nodes and can enable a wide range of general purpose industrial and IoT applications. Today, the K32 L2 MCU family is being brought to market in a scalable set of packages, core performance and memory configurations, from 64KB to 512KB flash, and backed by unmatched enablement, led by NXP’s complementary suite of MCUXpresso software and tools with example projects utilizing IAR, Keil, and GCC based toolchains.

Innovation means being first. And with more than 20 years of firsts, NXP’s MCU portfolio has grown into a powerhouse of more than 200 Arm®-based MCU families scaling from low-power Cortex®-M0+ to high performance Cortex®-M7 crossover MCUs.

MCUXpresso IDE is currently supported on macOS 10.12 to 10.14.

In macOS 10.15 (Catalina), Apple have introduced a new additional "signing" mechanism for software that is download outside of the Apple App Store, know as "Notarization". Currently MCUXpresso IDE for macOS is signed using NXP's Apple Developer ID, but has not yet gone through Apple's notarization process. This means that by default you will not be able to install if you are running macOS 10.15.

Have you ever checked your smartphone or your IoT device and received an alert for software updates? All you have to do is to simply accept the update when you have the network connectivity and the rest will be taken care of automatically by the software. Isn’t it simply amazing to be able to refresh your device, no matter where you are in the world? This update process is widely known as OTA (over the air).

OTA is a technology that manages software and lets you wirelessly upgrade the operating system/files of your platform.

As part of the MCUXpresso IDE v11.0.1 release, we had to make some major changes to our LinkServer debugging mechanism to support the latest silicon revision of the LPC55xx family of devices (revision 1B) and the more secure debug request mechanism required by these parts. Such silicon is supplied on LPC55S69-EVK boards marked Revision A2 (or later) on the board silkscreen.

iWave systems recently launched a new SMARC System on Module (SOM) based on the powerful NXP® i.MX 8QuadMax applications processors. This high performance SOM features an intelligent blend of MPUs+MCU power in a single device and integrates heterogeneous multicore 64 bit ARM® processors (Dual Cortex® A72@ 1.8 GHz + Quad Cortex® A53 @ 1.2 GHz and Dual Cortex® -M4F @ 266 MHz), targeted for applications that demand advanced real-time processing, multi-media performance as well as in applications that requires simultaneous multi-OS operations. For more details refer to the link: i.MX8 QuadMax NXP SMARC SOM

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

Hello, recently I have done Periph Blinky e.g. from LPCOpen library on MCUxpresso. I am using LPC1769 chip and I have toggled GPIO pin. In my case I have used buzzer pin i.e. Port 3 & Pin 25. Instead of using Timer delay I created a delay function i.e. void delay_ms(unsigned int ms). Here I am attaching the systick.c file. Hope it helps!!  

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.

Hello everyone, I am working on MCUxpresso and using LPC1769 controller. I am done with Led blinking in MCUxpresso. I have used flash magic to flash the hex file in controller using usb to ttl. But I faced a hex file issue while doing this project. So I thought I should share this with everyone who are facing the same issue. After compiling only .axf was getting created. For creating .hex file ,you need to do following settings

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

iWave Systems, a leading embedded solutions provider company based in Bangalore has successfully demonstrated Xen virtualization hypervisor on their i.MX8 QM SoC based System on Module. The  multi-core SOM comprises of 2x Arm^® Cortex^® -A72 @1.8 GHz and 4x Arm^® Cortex^®-A53 @1.2 GHz and 2x additional Cortex^®-M4F @ 266 MHz, rendering a highly powerful  integrated solution on a SMARC R2.0 compatible module.

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.

Searching for a low-power, well-integrated but cost-sensitive MCU for your embedded designs? Look no further – the K32 L2 MCU family is for you!

Dear MCUXpresso user,

We have decided to remove “Configurations” page from MCUXpresso SDK Builder website (http://mcuxpresso.nxp.com) with the December update this year.

Details are summarized below about the existing Configurations page and how page’s functionality will replaced.

An issue has been identified that impacts the debugging of older LPC devices using SEGGER Jlink via the version of MCUXpresso IDE v11.0.1 released on 4th September 2019.

This issue will be seen only when debugging an LPC device that use the IDE's Preinstalled part support i.e. parts that do not require an SDK - a debug operation via SEGGER Jlink will lead to an error as below:

We are pleased to announce that MCUXpresso IDE v11.0.1 (build 2563) is now available.

This is a maintenance release that builds upon the previous MCUXpresso IDE v11.0.0 release, and we recommend that all existing users download and install this new version. It also incorporates a minor update to the integrated MCUXpresso Config Tools.

Dear sdk developers,

During our development, more and more components are joining our sdk. It is necessary for the component sections recorded in yml data to follow a simple and effective naming convention, so that they can be well organized, identified and processed.

Here we provide the doc of Yml Data Record Component Naming Conventions, please kindly review and follow the rules in your future development.