This blog post is part of a collection, click here for links to the entire set, and a review of the products.
Introduction
The TI CC11XL Development KitTI CC11XL Development Kit arrived today as part of an Agilent and TI roadtest, so I decided to take some photos and a quick video before examining it further.
This development kit is ideal if you want to create wireless connectivity solutions. It allows you to experiment with the transceivers, try out the built-in software with in-built sensors, and prototype your own code using the supplied programmer/debugger.
CC11xL Integrated Circuits
TI has a vast variety of development kits and evaluation boards, and they can be considered to be essential to enable rapid solution development. They are an opportunity to quickly try out software and hardware, and try out your own changes, while being assured that the supplied hardware and software are a high quality reference design.
There is lots of information to glean from the designs, and the supplied schematics and board layouts help immensely.
The CC11XL development kit is intended to help create solutions using TI’s CC11xL series devices and the kit comes enabled with CC110L, CC113L and CC115L devices. The first is a transceiver IC, and the other two are receiver and transmitter chips respectively.
Texas Instruments has a vast array of wireless connectivity devices – see www.ti.com/wireless for details. The sub-Gigahertz wireless options include a ‘Performance Line’ and a ‘Value Line’. The CC11xL products fall into the Value Line category and are intended for cost-sensitive applications such as home automation, alarm systems and remote control.
Development Kit
The CC11XLDK-868-915 is a full development kit, but, as a side note, there are lower-cost options to get moving with the CC10xL family if required. There are small modules by Anaren which contain the CC110L on-board. There are also ‘BoosterPack’ boards which contain the Anaren module on a PCB with 0.1 inch headers. These BoosterPack boards could be soldered onto a stripboard, or can be plugged on top of TI ‘LaunchPad’ boards which are compact microcontroller development boards much like Arduino boards. The photo below shows some of this LaunchPad and BoosterPack ecosystem.
The full development kit is still extremely good value however. It saves a huge amount of time and effort and is therefore a small price to pay for such a comprehensive kit to quickly get a project developed. We have purchased a variety of these for work, and they all contain a pair of base boards known as a Transceiver Evaluation Boards (TrxEB) which include an on-board microcontroller and LCD display (and 2xAA battery holders around the back). The development kits ship with the wireless devices on daughter cards (known as Evaluation Modules) that plug onto the TrxEB. The kit also includes an MSP430 programmer/debug tool (unfortunately it’s not the latest MSP-FET model, but still a very handy thing to have) so that you can write and debug custom programs to run on the TrxEB boards or on your own circuit boards.
If you want to try out a different chip, you don’t need to re-purchase an entire development kit if you feel you have enough TrxEB base boards. You can just buy individual Evaluation Modules (i.e. daughter cards).
Here is a photo of the front and underside of the two CC110L evaluation modules that are part of the development kit:
Close-up view of the circuitry:
This photo shows the programmer/debugger and the cables that are supplied with the kit.
A Quick Test
Finally, here is a video showing the out-of-the-box experience. There are pre-loaded demonstrations on the board. This video shows the packet error rate (PER) test.
Summary
This has just been a very brief look at the wireless connectivity development kit for the CC11xL series of integrated circuits from Texas Instruments. More to come soon.
