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Interesting discussion on Freescale Kinetis

awinning

I know you guys are mainly interested in MCUs/embedded applications. I saw this discussion on the Freescale group, and thought it was worth posting here to give you a chance to actually influence a forthcoming product!

 

"Freescale announced their Kinetis family  of microcontrollers based on the ARM Cortex M4 core. As a result I am  looking for feedback in terms of what you as developemnt engineers would  like to see in a low cost development solution based around this  product family. I am looking for feedback in terms of  both hardware (dev. board and debug interface) and software (dev. tools  and RTOS requirement). All comments and suggestions welcome."

 

Feel free to suggest a Roadtest image imageimage

 

http://www.element-14.com/community/message/12647

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  • The most important things in a development kit are having access to all the pins and solid documentation with lots of examples with well-commented source code that explains how to use each one of the chips peropherals, explains what all the registers do and how all the peripherals are named in the include files.

     

    If someone can quickly run whatever they want quickly out of a new dev board then they will be much more likely to stay with it as opposed to running thru the demo and going back to what they are used to - even though it may not have exactly what the new project needs.

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  • The most important things in a development kit are having access to all the pins and solid documentation with lots of examples with well-commented source code that explains how to use each one of the chips peropherals, explains what all the registers do and how all the peripherals are named in the include files.

     

    If someone can quickly run whatever they want quickly out of a new dev board then they will be much more likely to stay with it as opposed to running thru the demo and going back to what they are used to - even though it may not have exactly what the new project needs.

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  • Former Member
    Former Member in reply to Former Member

    I absolutely agree with BADHABIT. The only thing I would like to add is that the other key point is the supported development environments.

    As I remember when I last time was working with Freescale's MCUs CodeWarrior was the only tool which was supported. Regarding ARM cores there a plenty of other tools available, some of them is free/open source or has a cheap version (like Rowley's CrossWorks or CooCox).

    Most of the silicon companies are selecting one tool and there is no alternative which is supported. One of the negative examples is TI. In case of theirs MSP430 MCU family they are supporting IAR tools. All the examples are available for that environment. Even theirs own Code Composer Studio is not used to create the sample projects and it is absolutely not straightforward to convert an IAR project for CCS. The positive thing that in case of TIs ARM product line like Stellaris the support is much better. There are five different environments are supported.

     

    So in my opinion Freescale should also think about selecting several tools thay provide sample projects and examples for. If they also decide to provide a driver library (like TI, STM, Atmel, Microchip do for their MCUs) then it is even essential to make it readily available for different tools.

  • in reply to Former Member
    These comments would be better posted on the discussion thread. For instance, the topic of development tools has been brought up already. I don't think the right people will necessarily see comments posted here.