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  • Author Author: sftwrngnr
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Got the kit... most of it :)

sftwrngnr

So the way cool (OK, very plain looking brown cardboard box) came on the equally boring and brown UPS truck yesterday.  It was waiting for me when I got home.  My daughter and I opened it to inventory the electronic goodness therein.  What I (we) have received are:

  • EFM32ZG (Wonder Gecko) Embedded Controller
  • Silicon Labs sensor puck
  • Wurth capacitor kit (885 070)
  • Wurth capacitor kit (885 080)
  • Wurth LED kit (150 151)
  • Wurth power inductors (744 833)

 

So, what we've not been shipped yet is:

  • EZR32WG Wireless starter kit
  • Wurth capacitor kit (885 060)
  • Wurth switch kit (499 001)

 

So the Wurth stuff is all surface mount, so... we're going to go to Goodwill and look at some used toaster ovens so that we can have the basics for a home brew surface mount station.  I'm pretty dang excited to get started on things, and so is my daughter.  We are planning on using as many of the parts that came in the kit as possible, so I'm going to work on designing (copying an existing design) and building a simple power supply (currently our plan is to use solar with battery, but redundancy is important).

 

Other news: I've been getting more proficient with freecad, so expect some amateur hour worth cad drawing of the proposed design, along with an initial revision of the system overview document, preliminary hardware design document and preliminary software design document.

  • in reply to ochikov

    Not sure on the cap kit Ognyan. I received both of these kits.

     

    There was some issue with the switch kit and they were removed from the challenge kit list. Wurth will still provide any switches you need however. You just need to go to their site, locate the part numbers you need and contact them.

     

    I think you can contact Simon Leuz at simon.leuz@we-online.de with part numbers and he will take care of you.

     

     

    Cheers,

    Rick

  • Hello, I also did not receive the kits:

     

    • Wurth capacitor kit (885 060)
    • Wurth switch kit (499 001)

     

    Do you have some information when they will be shipped?

  • in reply to sftwrngnr

    I hear ya. I don't have the wireless baords yet but I'm wotking with the EFM32ZG to get familiar with the platform and dev environment.

     

    Don't bother with downloading the docs seperately. Just do a complete install of SimplicityStudio. All the docs are in there.

     

    Cheers,

    Rick

  • in reply to RWReynolds

    Jealous that you're already gettin' your stuff workin'! I am taking my daughter to dinner for a belated b-day dinner, and then I have to finish up some day-job related work.  I'll probably be able to actually work on getting the dev tools downloaded and docs on the processor really looked at in earnest, starting next weekend.

  • One other note John. In digging a little deeper, it looks like you can use the AEM as long as the motherboard is powered from the USB port. It doesn't actually have to have the debugger connected. Check out section 4.1 MCU Power Selection of the User's Manual. But it still seems that it's only useful when the board is connected to SimplicictyStudio. I haven't seen anything on reading it through an MCU application. But there is an example application that shows how to get the MCU current and voltage usage and display it to the LCD display. Notes in the application read "Read MCU voltage and current consumption from board controller". I don't see any reference to the AEM in the code so I'm not sure if it uses it or not. It uses the Board Support Package library and I haven't dug into that code yet.

     

     

    I did just got my stepper motor running on the EFM32ZG, should be very similar to the EZR32WG. I'm about to do an energy profile on it. Fun stuff...