Renesas RX62N Dev board

June 8, 2011

Renesas RX62N dev board

At the end of 2010, Renesas jumped onto the hobbyist electronics bandwagon. Following in the footsteps of the Arduino based on Atmel’s AVR and the Launchpad based on Texas Instruments’ msp430, they released the Renesas RX62N development board with more toys than I’ve ever seen on a $100 board.

You could get this board for free by either entering a contest, or by sending an email requesting the board.

The contest rules required that the submitted project use Renesas’ proprietary toolkit, so I just sent in an email requesting the board.

Many months later, the board showed up in my mailbox!

I plugged it in and instant light show!

Demo Mode

Renesas certainly figured out how to make an excellent first impression on someone like me.

The second impression was even better. This board includes:

• 32 bit RX62N
• graphical backlit LCD display
• ethernet port with some odd super-precise ntp-style standard supported
• 128M serial flash
• micro sd slot
• CAN bus
• USB OTG port
• separate combo USB and JTAG port
• temperature sensor
• three axis accelerometer
• serial port
• microphone
• speaker
• several on-board crystals for timing

There have been at least two companion boards available, one for wifi and one designed to breakout RX62N pins as well as attach surface mount ICs.

So many toys, how a free board get any better?

But then things went downhill… I wanted to play with the amazing collection of toys on that board, but the KPIT GNU tools were extremely difficult to install. I had to send an email to request access to the KPIT GNU tools. Then after several days of waiting to get access to their gcc toolchain, I spent several hours trying to install those tools.

At some point, I gave up and went back to my Arduinos… I keep meaning to try to install those KPIT tools again.

Moral

The moral of this blog entry is, make your tools as easy to download and install as possible. I want to play with a new toy immediately, not two weeks later. Small increases in difficulty result in larger decreases in userbase.