This is a posting on the initial impressions of the FreeScale KL25z board.
I received mine in the mail, with much anticipation, and I wasn't disappointed.
It comes in a cardboard slide-out box, with a card showing the pin-outs...nice.
The board is smaller than I anticipated, and even comes with rubber feet attached ...nice
A mini-disk is supplied with CooCox IDE, however for the initial trial I have choosen to use mbed.org free online compiler.
The guide from E14 was extremely simple to use, and works a treat. Unfortunately you need to use a windows machine to install the mbed bootloader, but after that a browser is all you need.
It presents itself as a removable device, and I was able to use it on a locked down work computer, which meant a few hours one night I could add to the project.
After trying a few examples, and getting a little bit of a feel for it, I was amazed at how easy it was to use.
The next mission was checking for some documents to understand some of the definitions available.
This is one thing that I struggled to find (ie how do you know the RED_LED is already there and set on a pin), without resorting to opening a .h file.
I'm sure over the next few nights I can manage to track down the necessary paperwork, but in the meantime I have the .h file and examples to use.
I have a couple of ideas still running around for this board, but I don't really have a killer application in mind that fully uses its features.
There are 53 I/O's available, so running out of pins, is not an issue.
It runs at 48MHz, and has RTC, 3 axis accelerometer, capacitive touch slider, RGB led, and it even has USB hosting and dedicated SDA plug for debugging (yes 2 mini usb sockets).
Its low voltage/power with the ability to be woken using a pin (there are several that can be configured), so power can be a coin cell.
All this is only NZ$13.15.... so I brought 3 more to use in my project, and to have laying around to encourage me to use them.
One thing that might be helpful is a shield that fits the double row headers.
The Chipkit UNO is also in this boat, with both boards matching the Arduino layout on the outer row, someone needs to sort out a protoshield.!
In the meantime, i'm still thinking and working on a simple project that uses a fraction of this product.
Mark
edit
The pre-production units seem to have headers and the button cell fitted.
These are the photos of the 'live' versions, and a comparison for those of us that don't have those little metal tins....
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