Evaluation of the LPCXpresso LPC1114FBD48/301,1LPC1114FBD48/301,1 Board
The “package”
The LPCXpresso board comes in a shock protection envelope. The only things that can be found inside are the board itself and a paper card with a coupon (for Embedded Artist site purchase) and a link to an NXP page for support.
A really good resource is the LPCXpresso getting started guide available at: http://ics.nxp.com/support/documents/microcontrollers/pdf/lpcxpresso.getting.started.pdf , which gives you all the necessary information for getting you up and running in shortest time.
The target
The board itself is a clean design with the USB debugger on one side and the target LPC1114FBD48/301,1LPC1114FBD48/301,1 mcu on the other side.
The LPC1114FBD48/301,1LPC1114FBD48/301,1 target comes in a 48 pin, 0.5mm pitch package. Besides that there’s an LED, some passive components and 2 , 1 way headers, each having 27 pins spaced at 100mil which helps a lot when prototyping. The pins are named by their function (e.g. MOSI, MISO, SCK, I2C-SDA, I2C-SCL, …) but not all of them are actually connected (e.g. the LPC1114FBD48/301,1LPC1114FBD48/301,1 doesn’t have USB, so the USB-DM and USB-DP have no use).
The IDE
The IDE comes from CodeRed and it is based on Eclipse. The installation kit is 140MB (for version 3.4). After installing it together with the drivers for the debugger you need to obtain a licence. After registering a valid e-mail you’ll receive the activation code. This gives you a full licence with a debug limit(load limit) of 128KB. I started it and then I imported the example projects for LPC11xx. The examples are copied inside the IDE’s installation folder.
Another thing about CodeRed which I’ve found to be particularly interesting is the Quickstart Panel. I had some issues when I tried to debug the “blinky” project and it was caused by some weird Eclipse debug configuration options. By using the Quickstart panel I avoided these problems, so use it with confidence.
Debugger
The USB debugger is built around LPC3154 which has high-speed transfer capabilities (480Mbps). When plugged, the debugger presents itself as USB DFU(Device Firmware Upgrade) class and when debugging, the appropriate firmware is loaded into the LPC3154. This is a neat way to provide a flexible and adaptable debugger for which support of newer MCUs will be only a matter of loading the right firmware.
Running at 480Mbps, the debugger moves fast and it is quite an improvement (in terms of speed) from other USB debugger (e.g. XDS100v1 from TI which runs only at 12Mbps)
The JTAG signals are buffered by 2 x LVC125 and a LVC126 chip, thus protecting the LPC3154 pins against destruction.
The board and the debugger can be physically separated and the JTAG signals from the debugger will be available either at an 8 pin, single way header or at a 2x5 pins header.
Application examples
Among the provided examples another important one is the console print example which makes use of semihosting. This is quite useful when debugging projects without the use of let’s say serial ports. This feature comes at a cost and as stated in the readme of this project, the code on the target CPU will appear to run slower.
I have to mention 2 other great reviews on this board:
The board even though is cheap offers you the following:
- a nice Cortex-M0 MCU on a friendly prototyping board
- a fast debugger with upgrade capabilities in order to support future MCUs
- a full featured IDE, only the debug limit being at 128KB
- one of the best Eclipse based IDEs I’ve worked with (CodeRed)
Bogdan
