EEbeat

As I wrote about development kits and new driver and demonstration code for the RX microcontroller (MCU) family in the last couple of weeks, what I really wanted to tell you about was the rumored RX62N Renesas Demonstration Kit (RDK). Well it’s no longer a rumor. At the end of last week leading up to Renesas DevCon, the company launched its first development product with an RX MCU that included a full complement of communications-oriented peripherals.

The RX62N was announced last March in the communication-centric branch of the RX family. The MCU includes Ethernet support, USB 2.0, and CAN. The new RDK will provide the first broad opportunity for embedded designers to evaluate the MCU.

The kit is based on Micrium’s µC/OS-III real-time operating system – another recent addition to the RX ecosystem. Moreover the RDK comes with a complement of nine demonstration projects that exercise the on-chip peripherals and a variety of additional peripheral functions that are integrated on the demo board.

Additional peripherals include:

• An Analog Devices ADXL345 3-axis accelerometer, ADT7420 digital temperature sensor, and a ADMP401 digital MEMS microphone.
• A serial 128-Mbyte non-volatile phase-change memory from Micron Technology.
• The DP83640 10/100 Ethernet PHY from National Semiconductor.
• A 96×64-pixel graphics LCD with white backlight from Okaya.
• A header that can connect various daughter cards including the Beagle I2C/SPI Protocol Analyzer.

I haven’t received a publicity photo of the board just yet, but the boards were prevalent last night in the DevCon exhibits. I got my hands on one and took the photo below with my mobile phone.

There are going to be multiple ways for you to get your own RDK. At some point Renesas will sell the kits for $99. But the company has plans to give quite a few away for free. And some of the plans are quite exciting although I can’t share them just now. Stay tuned for more later in the week.

Ad BTW, there is a second blogger here at DevCon covering the event. Check out Murry Slovick’s DevCon 2010 blog including a report he has already posted on today’s keynote.

This blog post was originally published on the Renesas Rulz Doctor Micro blog.