Recently purchased MIMXRT1170-EVKB for a project, but it is so poorly designed, there are multiple design choice made it very annoying to use.
Why the lcd backlight is disconnected by default? Why power and control for the backlight IC is also disconnected?
To make things worse, all lcd power are disconnected, 1.8v 2.8v 3.3v, none of them have jumper installed by default. I guess NXP official LCD module do not need power then?
What is the point for it? let user have fun for solder jumpers? To protect the board from user connect to a wrong LCD pannel? Then how about also disconnect everything by solder jumper to protect all interface and circuits? Or just ship BOMs and sch, so user could use jumpers to make their own board ?
My question is, there are many useless jumper pins all over the board, why none of above LCD jumper using pin but force user to place multiple 0ohm resisters before even start using the board??
Jumpers apart, the MCU relys on one of the SPI flash to boot by default, and the boot data stored in flash instead of in MCU, that meas if the flash data is corrupted or wrong, you can't even program it without knowning correct parameters of the flash.
If your program set write protect in flash SR on purpose or by accident when crashed, then there is no any NXP tools to solve this commen issue. Your tool even supported 5 ways to activate QSPI mode, why no one bothers to just give a button for unlock the flash? CMSIS FLM / LinkProgrammer / Secure Provision Tool, NONE of them can unlock flash.
To make things worse (2nd), there are three flash on board, NONE of them have a header or test points for external programmer. If I want use an external programmer (as it is very common to encounter flash/data issues during developing), the only option is to take that chip off, then solder to an adapter then use the programmer.
Also for debugging, I can't find anything other than NXP IDE + Link Server could allow me to download and debug, thanks to genius bootROM design that after srst it won't jump to user application by default. Just why????
Giving up on NXP MCUs, STM32 is not perfect, but at least way less headache