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| Microcontrollers Offer Capacitive Touch and
Proximity Sensing Bringing capacitive-sensing capabilities to cost-sensitive applications, Texas Instruments (TI) has announced an expansion of its MSP430 microcontroller (MCU) family with capacitive touch technology. Developers can use the new MSP430FR2512 and MSP430FR2522 MCUs with integrated capacitive touch to add as many as 16 buttons as well as proximity sensing capability to industrial systems, home automation systems, appliances, power tools, home entertainment, personal audio applications and more.
New MSP430 microcontrollers with capacitive touch technology offer value and performance to applications exposed to electromagnetic disturbances, oil, water and grease. The MSP430FR2512 and MSP430FR2522 MCUs deliver International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61000-4-6-certified capacitive sensing MCU-based solutions for applications exposed to electromagnetic disturbances, oil, water and grease. According to TI, the new MCUs offer five times lower power consumption than the competition, supporting proximity sensing and touch through glass, plastic and metal overlays. CONTINUE READING New England's Largest Embedded Systems Conference Returns!
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Target Boards Support Renesas RX 32-bit MCUs Renesas Electronics has announced three new Target Boards for the RX65N, RX130 and RX231 Microcontroller (MCU) Groups, each designed to help engineers jump start their home appliance, building and industrial automation designs. Priced below $30, the Target Boards lower the price threshold for engagement, allowing more system developers to make use of Renesas' broad-based 32-bit RX MCU family.
The RX Target Boards provide an inexpensive entry point for embedded designers to evaluate, prototype and develop their products. Each board kit features an on-chip debugger tool that enables application design without requiring further tool investments. Through-hole pin headers provide access to all MCU signals pins, making it easy for users to interconnect to standard breadboards for fast prototyping.
The RX Target Board evaluation concept reuses the same PCB for all MCU variations. Since each member of the Renesas RX MCU Family has a common pin assignment, users experience a smooth transition between different RX Groups and RX Series using the same package version. In the case of the RX Target Boards, the widely used 100-pin LQFP package is on board.
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In-Circuit Programming/Debugging Tool Supports PIC MCUs Microchip Technology has introduced the MPLAB PICkit 4 In-Circuit Debugger. This low-cost PICkit 4 in-circuit programming and debugging development tool is meant to replace the popular PICkit 3 programmer by offering five times faster programming, a wider voltage range (1.2 V to 5 V), improved USB connectivity and more debugging interface options. In addition to supporting Microchip's PIC microcontrollers (MCUs) and dsPIC Digital Signal Controllers (DSCs), the tool also supports debugging and programming for the CEC1702 family of hardware cryptography-enabled devices.
This low-cost programming and debugging solution is well suited for those designing in the 8-bit space, but it is also perfectly suited for 16- and 32-bit development due, in part, to its 300 MHz, high-performance ATSAME70Q21B microcontroller on board. The benefits of faster programming time are less waiting and better productivity during development. This is especially important when designing with 32-bit microcontrollers with larger memory capacities.
The PICkit 4 development tool enables debugging and programming using the graphical user interface of MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The tool connects to the design engineer's computer using a USB 2.0 interface and can be connected to the target via an 8-pin single inline header that supports advanced interfaces such as 4-wire JTAG and serial wire debug with streaming data gateway. It is also backward compatible for demo boards, headers and target systems using 2-wire JTAG and In-Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) compatibility. CONTINUE READING
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Embedded Software Aids STM32 MCU System Development
STMicroelectronics has extended its STM32 software ecosystem with a Sigfox package that simplifies development and gives extra flexibility to connect Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to long-range, low-power wireless networks. The new X-CUBE-SFOX package is ready to use with ST's B-L072Z-LRWAN1 Discovery Kit, which is already LoRa enabled through I-CUBE-LRWAN embedded software. Developers can now work with either of these established Low-Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies on the same hardware, and create products that can use the two protocols individually or alternatively.
The Discovery Kit features the Murata CMWX1ZZABZ-091 module powered by an STM32L072 microcontroller, a sub-GHz radio transceiver SX1276 from Semtech, and is expandable via Arduino headers to add sensors or other IoT-device functions and capabilities. X-CUBE-SFOX contains a complete set of Sigfox libraries and application examples for the STM32L0, and can be ported to other microcontrollers in the STM32 family.
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IoT Security Solution for NXP MCUs and MPUs
NXP Semiconductors has introduced its new A71CH Secure Element (SE), a trust anchor, ready-to-use security solution for next-generation IoT devices, such as edge nodes and gateways. Designed to secure peer-to-peer or cloud connections, the chip comes with the required credentials pre-injected for autonomous cloud onboarding and peer-to-peer authentication. The solution is a Root of Trust (RoT) at the silicon level, with security functionalities such as encrypted key storage, key generation and derivation to protect private information and credentials for mutual authentication.
Unique to the chip, is its 'Plug & Trust" approach supporting easy integration of security and cloud onboarding. It does this using host libraries and a development kit compatible to different NXP microcontrollers (MCU and MPU) platforms such as Kinetis and i.MX. Also, example code and various application notes are available to streamline the design process.
Thanks to the collaboration with Data I/O, embedded systems developers further benefit from an easy personalization service on the A71CH for any quantities in addition to NXP's trust provisioning service. As a result, the new security IC gives developers, even those with limited security expertise, freedom to innovate and deploy secure solutions.
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