Freedom KL26Z board

I bought a Freedom KL26Z board this week, because I wanted another Freedom board, and the KL26Z has somewhat nicer peripherals (added magnetometer, light sensor, I²S interface) and only costs a a couple of bucks more. It should be fairly easy to add the KL26Z to the Data Logger software, once the KL25Z board is working with it.  We may have both working in time for the Spring Applied Circuits course.

Unfortunately, the board came with the same incompetently designed bootloader (by P&E Microcomputer Systems) as the KL25Z—you can’t load programs from Mac OS X, only from Windows machines (and not Windows 8, only Windows 7). They claim that this problem was fixed last year with a newer version of the OpenSDA software, but the board I just bought from DigiKey certainly doesn’t work with Mac OS X:

Board Name is: FRDM-KL26Z
MicroBoot Kernel Version is: 1.05
Bootloader Version is: 1.09
Application Version is: 0.00

You still need a Windows machine to load the OpenSDA software, so it is not that great a “fix” (if it even works). I’ll have to make a special trip up to campus to find an ancient Windows machine. When I do that, I might put on the MBED.org download software, which was working with Mac OS X (on the KL25Z boards) months before P&E claimed to have a fix. I’m assuming that the SDA interface is the same on the KL25Z and KL26Z boards, but I’m not certain of it (mbed has different download software for the KL46Z board, which makes me concerned that there are some board-specific differences).  I could try downloading the latest P&E Microcomputer Systems software and see if it works on the KL25Z board—if not I can go back to the mbed software on that board and wait for mbed to release KL26Z software.

I’m planning to use the bare-metal ARM software development kit, with the gnu gcc compiler, for future development on the KL25Z and KL26Z boards, rather than the mbed.org development tools, because the compiled code can be much smaller (less extra junk added in).  I’ve got the code installed on my Mac, but I’ve not tried running it yet. My son, who has gotten a few small programs working with the bare-metal ARM system using the KL25Z board, was going to help me set up my Makefiles this weekend (including a loader script that removes a lot of the stdio package if you aren’t using it—the default bare-metal ARM setup includes some fairly useless “assert” statements that add many kbytes to the downloaded programs). Unfortunately, there are a lot of different viruses circulating in Santa Cruz this winter, and he’s running a fever this weekend, so we’ll probably have to delay my getting bare-metal ARM working.