RoadTest: Freescale KEA Series 32-bit MCU
Author: ramgarden
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?: Arduino and custom shield / gyro accelerometer sensors.
What were the biggest problems encountered?: Difficult to get started. Too much doumentation instead of simple step by step instructions. Codewarrior IDE too cumbersome for first timer. Compared to Arduino IDE where you can quickly jump right in and change the code and with examples right under the file menu.
Detailed Review:
Typo in the printed quick start guide:
Page 3: "offer flexibility for a width variety of applications" should be "a wide variety".
During the install of the codewarrior IDE I assumed the only checkbox I needed to check was the one for "Kinetis". This should be in the quick start guide when it covers the codewarriror IDE.
It's hard to find out how to start with the codewarrior IDE. Do we create a BareboneBoard type project? If so, which one of the Kinetis boards is this one? It doesn't have TRK-KEA listed anywhere in the list.
Found the Training labs by accident while browsing around the included CD rom. As soon as I tried opening Lab 1 it gave this error:
An error has occurred. See error log for more details.
Unknown target type: com.freescale.cw.system.kinetis.KEAZ.KEAZ128M4
I still can't figure out how to start up a project with codewarrior so that I can write a quick test app or even how I would send it to the board. It is too confusing with too much documentation. I was able to open Lab 1 but can't see how to send it to the board to test it. When I just try to run it I get this error:
Error creating session: Invalid target type selection in connection "TRK-KEA128_Lab1_FLASH_OpenSDA"
I'll have to dig deeper and spend a few hours reading through these 1000+ documents to figure out how to really get going with my project idea.
I might give up and just use an arduino and a sensor shield. Although I did like the fact that this Kinetis board has the CAN Connector that I could use to plug into the ODBII port on the car.
In fact, the CAN connector is probably the best part about this hardware. If I can figure out how to buy or build a connector that would plug in to the ODBII port I should be off to a good start. It's a good thing I'm a member of a makerspace where we could build one if we had to. I would then still need to figure out what's going on with codewarrior that's keeping me from quickly jumping in to the code and sending it off the Kinetis board...
Top Comments
I think you're experiencing normal symptoms of seeing eclipse-based IDEs for the first time. I wouldn't give up, because once you've got over the hurdle, you'll find many other IDEs easy-to-use too, because…