The MCUXpresso IDE is an Eclipse based development environment that offers more advanced editing, compiling and debugging of applications for the Rapid IoT device.
In this blog post I'm going to cover generating an example program using MCUXpresso.
You need to download and install two components:
1) MCUExpresso IDE http://www.nxp.com/MCUXpresso
2) Rapid IoT SDK http://www.nxp.com/rapid-iot
The Rapid IoT SDK actually contains two SDKs, one for each processor in the device. You need to import both SDKs into the IDE (SDK...MKW41Z4 and SDK...MK64F12).
NXP has provided a set of examples programs for the Rapid IoT MCUXpresso setup on github - https://github.com/theophieleroy/rapid_iot_mcuxpresso_examples.
Use the Import project(s) from file system to load those examples into the IDE.
The following shows the example programs loaded in the IDE.
For my test of MCUXpresso I am going to use the ble_led_control example. The project files are shown below.
The functionality is fairly straightforward. The Rapid IoT is set up to pair with another BLE device. In my case I am going to use my Android tablet (Nexus7). The tablet needs to use the Nordic nRF mobile app which provides BLE scanning and connection capability. Once the Rapid IoT is paired, the app can either read or write two bytes of data to/from it. The first byte represents luminosity values from 00 to 03 and the second byte represents color from 00 to 03 (red,green.blue,white) of the RGB LED.
First step is to select the project and build it from the Quick Start Panel.
The result of the build is displayed in the Console Window.
The final step is to connect the Rapid IoT to the computer in Mass Storage mode and copy the ble_led_control.bin file to it.
The following are screen captures from my Nexus7 tabletusing the nRF app after the ble_led_control program was successfully uploaded to the Rapid IoT.
Here is a result of the BLE scan after I successfully paired the Rapid IoT (RPK-B2BD).
The client panel shows the RGB LED read/write service for the Rapid IoT.
Opening the write panel allows values to be entered for the LED luminosity and color.
Here is a short video showing the LED color being changed from white to red to green to blue.
Now that I've verified the operation of both the Rapid IoT Studio and MCUXpresso IDE, I can move on to developing my own applications. The first program that I am going to attempt will be a web based interface using the Rapid IoT to external read and write NFC tags.
