Freescale debuts Kinetis L Series Freedom development platform
Freescale has inroduced their Freedom development board. The FRDM-KL25Z platform is enabled by Kinetis L Series KL1 and KL2 MCUs families built on ARM Cortex-M0+ processor. The board includes the MKL25Z128VLK4 MCU running at 48 MHz with 128 KB flash, 16 KB SRAM, USB OTG (FS), capacitive touch “slider,” MMA8451Q accelerometer and tri-color LED. The Arduino-style form factor provides easy access to MCU I/O, and an OpenSDA debug interface is included. Best yet, the board lists for $12.95 plus shipping from Digikey and other distributors.
For more info including links to the board manual and OpenSDA User guide, visit the Freescale’s Freedom board product page.
This entry was posted in dev boards, News and tagged Freedom dev platform, Freescale.
Comments
I preordered one of these from Newark when you first blogged about them, and it’s arriving tomorrow!
Mmmmmmmmmmm shiny lovelyness will order after I replace my burnout arduino
Mine is out for delivery!
Got mine yesterday. Yours are out there somewhere…
Well, they don’t have international distribution, so no wonder everyone talks those arduinos and launchpads.
Try element14.com (formerly Farnell). Just ordered one through the Australian warehouse. I only needed a Raspberry Pi but it was more cost effective to buy one of these and get free shipping than buy just the Pi and get slugged an $15 shipping fee for having and order < AUD $45.
So yeah it was a bit of an impulse buy but I have… plans… for this bad boy.
Interestingly, Freescale designed the board to be pin-compatible with Arduino shields. This is surprising news from a company that has been known to be very unfriendly to hackers/makers.
What is with the bar code on the board? It takes up a lot of real estate.
What are guys doing with this board? Doesn’t seem to have a lot of memory and it probably uses more power than the Arduino’s PIC chip or TI’s MSP430 Launchpad (don’t see much of a point in their Stellaris Launchpad either)-:
For $12.95, it is good for kids to learn in school.
Ken, you’re kidding, right? 128K flash and 16K RAM is loads more than the Arduino (32K/2K), and huge amounts more than the MSP 430 that ships with the launchpad (16K/0.5K).
The Freescale board runs at 48MHz vs. Arduino (16MHz) or MSP430 (16MHz).
The Freescale chip also has bigger/better/faster/more peripherals than the Arduino or the MSP430. In addition, the ARM Cortex-M0+ is a 32-bit core vs. Arduino’s 8-bit or MSP430′s 16-bit cores.
You probably want to check your claim on low-power ability as well; Cortex-M0 cores are designed to be super-low-gate-count cores and Freescale claims “2x more CoreMark/mA than the closest 8/16-bit architecture”
Granted, each of these processors has its applications. Not all uses require a 48MHz 32-bit processor. But claiming that this chip doesn’t have much memory when compared to Arduino or MSP430 (granted, you didn’t explicitly state that but your sentence structure suggests that was your idea) is ignorant.
Personally, given Freescale’s history of being hostile to hobbyists, I’m not likely to use this board at all. But I’m having a lot of fun playing with my STM32F0DISCOVERY board, which is based on a very similar chip from ST.
It’s not just a 32-bit registers, it has a 32×32 multiply instruction.
Digikey link seems to be broken: http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?x=0&y=0&lang=en&site=us&KeyWords=Freescale+freedom
Wow, what a great product!
Do you know about development tools? Are they free/limited or low cost?
Out-of-box support for IAR, Keil and Red Suite. Free & limited: the first two are typically universally limited to 32K and Red Suite (at least here) to 64K. Curiously, no mention of CodeWarrior…
GCC & friends are an exercise left to the reader, at least as shipped.
I just posted a GCC “bare metal” example on github: https://github.com/payne92/bare-metal-arm
It builds entirely with the freely available GCC toolchain, with no other external dependencies.
Thanks Andrew, I’ll probably end up using your examples as a base ;)
Any news about Arduino compiler support this? Or using code+libraries of arduino, Any Ports of Arduino?