Review of EK-RA2L1 Dev Board (Arm Cortex®-M23 core)

• Hello Element14 Community! I'm omkar bhilare, thanks to the element 14 roadtest program I got a sample EK-RA2L1 dev board for testing.
• In this review, I had tested this board'ss sample program and also WIP on a basic new example using e2 IDE.
• I tried to run all software on ubuntu, I have added most of the steps in this review itself so that others can replicate the result.
• Some information about the board as follows:
• The EK-RA2L1 evaluation kit enables users to effortlessly evaluate the features of the RA2L1 MCU Group and develop embedded systems applications using Renesas' Flexible Software Package (FSP) and e2 studio IDE.
• Features of EK-RA2L1 which I found interesting:
  • MCU Native Pin Access:
    • R7FA2L1AB2DFP MCU
    • 48MHz, Arm Cortex®-M23 core
    • 256KB Code Flash, 32KB SRAM
  • Ecosystem & System Control Access
    • Debug modes
      • Debug on-board (SWD)
      • Debug In (ETM, SWD and JTAG)
      • Debug Out (SWD)
    • User LEDs and buttons
      • Three user LEDs (red, blue, green)
      • Power LED (white) indicating the availability of regulated power
      • Debug LED (yellow) indicating the debug connection
      • Two user buttons, One reset button
  • Lots of Expansion Boards: SparkFun® Qwiic® connector, MikroElektronika™ mikroBUS connector, Two SeeedGrove® system (I2C and analog) connectors, Two Digilent Pmod™ (SPI and UART) connectors, Arduino™ (Uno R3) connector

• The following Image summarizes the features of the board:

Received Sample Dev Board:

Quick Start Guide:

• The board comes with a quick-start example project, which is described in the following flow chart.

Running the Quick Start Example Project:

• For sending inputs to the board we will need to download the J-Link RTT viewer.
• Download link for RTT Viewer: https://www.segger.com/downloads/jlink/
• I will be testing this board on Ubuntu, most of the software needed for programming and debugging of this board does support both Linux and windows.
• I found very few resources about the JLink RTT viewer running on Linux, so that's why I'm attaching the steps below:

• Download the deb and install it, then open the RTT viewer.
• Select the following device and SWD Interface.

• RTT Viewer Connected:

• Main Menu:

• Kit Information:
  • Press 1 for Kit information:

• Press 2 for the next steps:

• So this was the quick start example and SWD debugging on this dev board.

E2 IDE:

- Work In progress.

Summary:

• The initial experience of this board was good for me. From the hardware perspective, It has interesting expansion ports. It even had PMOD ports that can be connected to external MCU/FPGA/Sensor.
• I believe on software Side Documentation can be improved. This review is in Work In progress. More things will be added before the deadline.