Leds and Buttons - Freescale FRDM-K64F

Hi makers, programmers and curious :)

   This post will be about my first contact with the ARM technology, by means of my newly arrived Freescale FRDM-K64F development board. As a good Arduino user the first thing I wanted to do with my board was to blink the RGB led it features onboard, so I did it!. The code I developed can be found here . I got a lot of help and examples from the mBed online compiler.

my first ARM-based project

   The blinking LED example from mBed website uses a "wait()" function which I don't like (because wastes processing time), so I developed my own code based on a counter that controls the "entering or not" in the blinking function. It is possible to notice in the gif image above that all the led colors are being lit, one after another; I was satisfied with the results, so I moved to the next step: adding buttons to it!. 

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   Again my code is very simple (and can be found here): when no buttons are pressed the blue LED is on; when the left button is pressed the LED turns green and for the right button the LED turns red. It took me only a few minutes to write, compile and test both circuits!.

buttons and LED's on my ARM board

I hope you guys are enjoying my blog, and I surely want to here from you. See you all soon.

A dream-embedded programmer

Hi Guys, this is Clovis !

   I am a Electrical Engineering student (3rd year) willing to learn embedded programming of microcontrollers and systems. I`m from Brazil but at this moment I`m living in Vancouver (Canada) as an undergraduate exchange student @ UBC. Besides embedded programming I also love to write down everything that I believe to be worth sharing, and that`s why I just started this Blog!!.

   My plan is to learn embedded systems programming and share every step of this journey with you all, so that we can learn and evolve together. Of course this is only the first post (on a warm friday morning during the north-American winter), but I hope I can share more and more details about my student and professional life with you (in posts to come).

   You must be asking yourself which technology I am going to use in order to learn embedded programming, right?. Well, I decided to start with a Freescale ARM cortex M0+, the Freedom Kinetis E-series platform, just because I had a course in my undergrad studies (Microcontrollers) and I learned hot to program on Freescale environment. Another technology I will be using as well is the FPGA, based on a ALTERA DE2 Educational board; I decided to use it because (again) I am taking a course at UBC (digital systems design EECE353) which teaches us how to synthesize logic circuits in VHDL.

   By the next few days you will start to see some very basic posts regarding my first steps into this huge embedded-programming world. See you guys,