Thursday, June 21, 2012

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!!!

Monday, June 18, 2012

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....