RoadTest: Freescale K60 Kinetis Tower System Kit
Author: aditya_g8
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: sam7-ex256 board from Olimex, which is cheap but the support and development suite is not as comprehensive!
What were the biggest problems encountered?: IAR development suite has limited edition of 32Kb after a month!
Detailed Review:
Hey guys! Sorry for the delayed review!
I want to thank element14 again for giving me the board, I at first thought I wasn't going to get it, but then suddenly I get a package there it was!
Lets start with what the board has, it has everything, ethernet, serial, can, i2c, usb host, slave, mmc reader, accelrometer and cortex-m4 very powerful!
I am using the tower K60 system with code warrior system developement tools! Its a great board , I am new to cortex-m4 platforms, but the iar system developement with qnx and application examples made my code developement fun. I started as a newbie for my project involving linking around 1000 nodes with sensors to relay data via a zigbee back to the K60 Kinetis Tower System. The task here was a little complicated as the data needed to be updated ecery 5 minutes and passed to a web-server via ethernet an RTOS was essential, the simple RS-232 drivers for qnx and ethernet sample app made the task much simpler than my previous experiences. The power comsumption which I would have liked to measure is not as easy because of multiple components on board which I dont need, not enough test points I guess. But the developement time was significantly reduced because of qnx integration with code warrior as I could debug see each task parameters in detail with excecution time to stack and also processor idle time. A few draw backs were, the developement system is exteremly costly for a student but the good part is freescale is nice to students and extended my evaluation period by 30 more days! I managed to complete my linking with 10 test nodes and a simple web server within 2 months which included software for each node and web server, which is pretty nice 
by my pace.... Again if you are looking for a good developement board with a great developement suite and support go ahead with K60, freescale is very good with even n00bs like me!
Please feel free to ask me questions about the board anytime!
