1
Plug It In2
Get Software3
Build, Run4
CreateSign in to save your progress. Don't have an account? Create one.
Let's take your FRDM-KL26Z for a test drive. You have the choice of watching the sequence in a short video or following the detailed actions list below.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Your FRDM-KL26Z comes loaded with a "bubble level" demo that leverages the on-board accelerometer. When the board is flat, the RGB LED is turned off, and when the board is tilted, the red or blue LEDs gradually illuminate based on the degree of tilt on the X- and Y-Axis.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
The Kinetis Software Development Kit (SDK) is complimentary and includes full source code under a permissive open-source license for all hardware abstraction and peripheral driver software.
Click below to download the SDK Release appropriate for your computer's operating system.
Get Kinetis SDKSomething went wrong! Please try again.
NXP offers a complimentary toolchain called Kinetis Design Studio (KDS).
No problem, the Kinetis SDK includes support for other tools such as IAR , Keil and command-line GCC .
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Many of the example applications output data over the MCU UART so you'll want to make sure that the driver for the board's virtual COM port is installed. It should install automatically when you plug the board in your PC. If the driver does not automatically install, click here to download the installer.
With the serial port driver installed, run your favorite terminal application to view the serial output from the MCU's UART. Configure the terminal to 115,200 baud rate, 8 data bits, no parity and 1 stop bit. To determine the port number of the FRDM-KL26Z's virtual COM port, open the device manager and look under the "Ports" group.
Not sure how to use a terminal application? Try one of these tutorials: Tera Term Tutorial, PuTTY Tutorial.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
The Kinetis SDK comes with a long list of demo applications and driver examples. To see what's available, browse to the SDK 'examples' folder of your SDK installation and select your board, the FRDM-KL26Z: <sdk_install_directory>/examples/frdmkl26z
.
To learn more about demo applications or driver examples, open the Kinetis SDK Demo Applications User's Guide, located in <sdk_install_directory>/doc
.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
If one or more of the demo applications or driver examples sounds interesting, you're probably wanting to know how you can build and debug yourself. The Getting Started with Kinetis SDK guide provides easy, step-by-step instructions on how to configure, build, and debug demos for all toolchains supported by the SDK.
Use the guide below to learn how to open, build and debug an example application using the Kinetis Design Studio (KDS) IDE.
Before using KDS IDE with KSDK, it is recommended that you make sure that your tools are up-to-date. The steps discussed below are shown using the Windows version of KDS, but are identical for Mac and Linux users.
The following steps will guide you through opening the hello_world application. These steps may change slightly for other example applications as some of these applications may have additional layers of folders in their path.
Note: The steps required for Linux and Mac OS are identical to those for Windows.
Point to the example application project, which can be found using this path:
<install_dir>/boards/<board_name>/<example_type>/<application_name>/kds
For this guide, choose the specific location:
<install_dir>/boards/frdmke15z/demo_apps/hello_world/kds
The FRDM-KL26Z board comes loaded with the mbed/CMSIS-DAP debug interface from the factory. If you have changed the debug OpenSDA application on your board, visit OpenSDA for information on updating or restoring your board to the factory state.
Note: Mac users must install the J-Link OpenSDA application in order to use the KDS IDE to download and debug their board.
For Linux OS users only, run the following commands in your terminal. These install 'libudev' onto your system, which is required by KDS IDE to launch the debugger
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install libudev-dev libudev1
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0
The following steps will guide you through opening the hello_world application. These steps may change slightly for other example applications as some of these applications may have additional layers of folders in their path.
If not already done, open the desired example application workspace. Most example application workspace files can be located using the following path:
<install_dir>/boards/<sdk_board_name>/<example_type>/<application_name>/iar
Using the hello_world demo as an example, the path is:
<install_dir>/boards/frdmke15z/demo_apps/hello_world/iar
The FRDM-KL26Z board comes loaded with the mbed/CMSIS-DAP debug interface from the factory. If you have changed the debug OpenSDA application on your board, visit OpenSDA for information on updating or restoring your board to the factory state.
After the MDK tools are installed, Cortex® Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS) device packs must be installed to fully support the device from a debug perspective. These packs include things such as memory map information, register definitions and flash programming algorithms. Follow these steps to install the IMXRT1010 CMSIS pack.
The following steps will guide you through opening the hello_world application. These steps may change slightly for other example applications as some of these applications may have additional layers of folders in their path.
If not already done, open the desired demo application workspace in:
<install_dir>/boards/<sdk_board_name>/<example_type>/<application_name>
The workspace file is named <application_name>.uvmpw, so for this specific example, the actual path is:
<install_dir>/boards/frdmke15z/demo_apps/hello_world/iar/hello_world.uvmpw
The FRDM-KL26Z board comes loaded with the mbed/CMSIS-DAP debug interface from the factory. If you have changed the debug OpenSDA application on your board, visit OpenSDA for information on updating or restoring your board to the factory state.
This section contains the steps to install the necessary components required to build and run a KSDK demo application with the Arm GCC toolchain, as supported by the Kinetis SDK. There are many ways to use Arm GCC tools, but this example focuses on a Windows environment. Though not discussed here, GCC tools can also be used with both Linux OS and Mac OSX.
Download and run the installer from GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain . This is the actual toolchain (i.e., compiler, linker, etc.). The GCC toolchain should correspond to the latest supported version, as described in the Kinetis SDK Release Notes.
The Minimalist GNU for Windows (MinGW) development tools provide a set of tools that are not dependent on third party C-Runtime DLLs (such as Cygwin). The build environment used by the KSDK does not utilize the MinGW build tools, but does leverage the base install of both MinGW and MSYS. MSYS provides a basic shell with a Unix-like interface and tools.
Note: The installation path cannot contain any spaces.
Add the appropriate item to the Windows operating system Path environment variable. It can be found under "Control Panel → System and Security → System → Advanced System Settings" in the "Environment Variables..." section. The path is:
<mingw_install_dir>\bin
Assuming the default installation path, C:\MinGW, an example is shown below. If the path is not set correctly, the toolchain does not work
Note: If you have "C:\MinGW\msys\x.x\bin" in your PATH variable (as required by KSDK 1.0.0), remove it to ensure that the new GCC build system works correctly.
Create a new system environment variable and name it ARMGCC_DIR. The value of this variable should point to the Arm GCC Embedded Toolchain installation path, which, for this example, is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\GNU Tools Arm Embedded\4.9 2015q3
Reference the installation folder of the GNU Arm GCC Embedded tools for the exact path name of your installation
To build an example application, follow these steps.
Change the directory to the example application project directory, which has a path like this:
<install_dir>/boards/<board_name>/<example_type>/<application_name>/armgcc
For this guide, the exact path is:
<install_dir>/boards/frdmke15z/demo_apps/hello_world/armgcc
The GCC tools require a J-Link debug interface. To update the OpenSDA firmware on your board to the latest J-Link app, visit OpenSDA. After installing the J-Link OpenSDA application, download the J-Link driver and software package from Segger Downloads .
Change to the directory that contains the demo application output. The output can be found in using one of these paths, depending on the build target selected:
<install_dir>/boards/<board_name>/<example_type>/<application_name>/armgcc/debug
<install_dir>/boards/<board_name>/<example_type>/<application_name>/armgcc/release
For this guide, the path is:
<install_dir>/boards/frdmke15z/demo_apps/hello_world/armgcc/debug
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Let's create our own project and make a simple SDK-based application. NXP provides an intuitive, simple project generation utility that allows creation of custom projects based on the Kinetis SDK.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
After extracting the ZIP file, open the utility by clicking on the KSDK_Project_Generator executable for your computer's operating system. Point the tool to your SDK installation path, name your project, and select the board that it uses as a reference. Click on the Quick Generate button to finish.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Your new project will be located in <sdk_install_directory>/examples/frdmkl26z/user_apps
. Open the project in your toolchain of choice by using the same process described in Section 3.2.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Now, let's make our new project do something other than spin in an infinite loop. The SDK examples provide a board support package (BSP) to do various things specific to the board, including macros and definitions for items such as LEDs, switches and peripheral instances. To keep things simple, lets make the LED blink using the BSP macros.
Update the main() function in your project's main.c file with the following code:
volatile int delay;
// Configure board specific pin muxing
hardware_init();
// Initialize the UART terminal
dbg_uart_init();
PRINTF("\r\nRunning the myProject project.\n");
// Enable GPIO port for LED1
LED1_EN;
for (;;)
{
LED1_ON;
delay = 5000000;
while(delay--);
LED1_OFF;
delay = 5000000;
while(delay--);
}
Something went wrong! Please try again.
With the changes made to your main() function, build your application. Remember to build the SDK platform library first if you did not build any of the other SDK examples in the previous steps. Once the build is complete, download the application to your board.
If you need help figuring out how to build, download or run an application, reference your tool-specific guide from Section 3.2.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
With the application downloaded, you will see the FRDM-KL26Z's green LED blinking. You can also view terminal output using PRINTF.
Something went wrong! Please try again.
Tera Term is a very popular open source terminal emulation application. This program can be used to display information sent from your NXP development platform's virtual serial port.
PuTTY is a popular terminal emulation application. This program can be used to display information sent from your NXP development platform's virtual serial port.
No problem, your board simply came in the old packaging and has a different out-of-box demo loaded into the flash memory.
You should be seeing the RGB LED toggling between each of the three colors: red, blue and green. It's OK to move onto the next step when you're ready.
Try proceeding to the next steps to get other example applications running on your board. If you still have problems, try contacting us through the NXP Community .
Connect with other engineers and get expert advice on designing with the FRDM-KL46Z on one of our community sites.
Installing Software for the FRDM-KL26Z
Jump Start Your Design with the Kinetis SDK
Install Your Toolchain
PC Configuration
Build and Run SDK Demos on the FRDM-KL26Z
Explore the SDK Example Code
Build, Run and Debug SDK Examples