Getting started with mX-LPC1343-S board from NGX Technologies

The mX-LPC1343-S is a low cost board on LPC1343 from NGX technologies. To get started with this board you need to upgrade the firmware of the debugger(I am not sure whether this is necessary, but I did it!!!). First short the jumper JP1, you can do this by a single wire as shown below.

Jumper JP1 shorted using a wire

After this, connect your board to your PC. This board will be listed as 'USB Mass Storage' in your device manager. When you go inside the drive you can see something similar as shown below. Factory fresh board will have default debugger bin file.

Screenshot of the drive contents

Download the latest firmware from here.
Download ColinkEx USB driver v1.2.0 from here.
Install the downloaded USB drivers and replace the previous version of firmware with the latest firmware in the mounted drive.

Screenshot of drive with the latest firmware.

After pasting, unplug and re-plug the usb cable. Now you can find two additional devices in your device manager as shown below. One is a virtual COM port and other is the CooCox ColinkEx Debug Interface.

Screenshot of Device manager after upgrading the firmware.

Now you are good to go!!! Using CoFlash, you can download the bin to the uC's flash as shown below. You can also debug your code using CoIDE.

CoFlash in action

You can find CooCox MDK plugin in CooCox website, using which you can debug with the Keil IDE.

Good Luck!!!

Programming LPC4330 - Xplorer using DFU download/upload tool

As mentioned in my previous blog, LPC4330 Xplorer can be programmed in different modes. Now using DFU download/upload tool we can download .bin file onto the ram for execution. In order to using this tool the DIP switches on Xplorer board should be configured in following configuration,

SW1 - OFF
SW2 - ON
SW3 - OFF
SW4 - ON

Download winusb drivers from here
Download DFU tool from here

Connect the usb cable provided with the Xplorer to USB0 connector and then update the driver with the downloaded winusb drivers. After successful installation, extract the DFU tool to a folder and run the application

Screenshot of the DFU tool running on my machine

If everything is fine, then you will get "HIGH SPEED USB" as shown in above screenshot. Provide the path to the binary file and click on 'Generate binary file with header'. Finally, click on 'Start'. Soon after download is done, You can see your code in execution.

Screenshot after the download is complete

Once the download is done, connection with the board is lost as shown is above screenshot. Reset the board and you are good to go again.

Blinky running on Xplorer, programmed using DFU

Good Luck....

LPC4330 - Xplorer Review

LPC4330 is cortex M4 device from NXP semiconductors and NGX technologies were one among few board manufacturers who designed a board for LPC4330 controllers. LPC4330 has asymmetric dual core, one cortex M0 and other cortex M4. Both cores have independent program memories.

LPC4330-Xplorer

LPC4330-Xplorer is the board manufactured by NGX Technologies Pvt. Ltd. It costs about 2500 INR($50). This low cost board comes along with two usb cables, one for usb Device and other for usb Host connection. The board has two USB ports, either of them can be used to power up the board. Two user LED's, one user input switch and one Reset switch can be used by user. It has audio in-out capabilities too. User can select different boot modes depending upon the DIP switches. But not all boot combinations are not support. LPC4330-Xplorer has 32MB SPI Quad flash which can be used to store program code. Ethernet connectivity is well supported by this board. The board comes with pre-loaded peripheral test program which can be used to test the capabilities of the boards. The Example codes provided at the NGX Technologies website are good enough to get started with this board. But none of them uses the cortex M0 core. User guide provided is also very precise. But the Reset switch on the board works every alternate time. This is a silicon issue! This board can be used along with Xpresso baseboard by NGX technologies for peripheral extension. The board also has 10-pin cortex debug header which provides the flexibility to debug using LPC link.


Pros:

1. Low cost
2. Asymmetric Dual core
3. Peripheral enriched 

Cons:

1. Reset works every alternate time(Silicon issue) 
2. Debug header is not hobbyist friendly.