I found a Freescale Freedom board hiding in my closet. I guess I had won it in a Grad School raffle and never touched it afterwards. So I decided to give it a try. I am hoping to provide a short tutorial on this board and then venture into trying out different stuff on the board.
To begin with, lets see what the Freedom Board is made up of. Like any other development board, the Freescale Freedom board is a mini development platform. It comes equipped with the Kinetis L Series KL25 Microcontroller unit. And along with this MCU, we have a few other features like a multi-colored LED, a 3 axis accelerometer and a capacitive touch slider.
Another important feature of this board is the OpenSDA platform support. OpenSDA is a hardware/software platform. It comes with a secondary Microcontroller unit which provides setup and debug capabilities. It acts as a bridge between the target processor and the Usb Controller. The OpenSDA Hardware consists of a USB host which can be programmed to emulate any device of choice but mostly is used as a virtual serial port. It also consists of a Mass Storage Device or the BootLoader, which provides
a quick and easy mechanism for loading different OpenSDA Applications such as flash programmers, run-control debug interfaces, serial-to-USB converters, and more..
So for most part we will be using this Open SDA platform because it makes debugging easy and writing code easier.
Now that we have an idea of what the hardware looks like, we should get started. In the next section, we will see how to program the OpenSDA Bootloader and load the mbed bootloader on it.
An Engineer's Path... 