Programming an NXP FRDM Board to use custom peripherals.
As of Fall of 2025, the students in the Microprocessors course taught at Texas State University must use Vitis as their IDE while programming the $150 Real Digital Blackboard to use the UART, I2C, and SPI connections to read and write between the buttons, LEDs, sensor, and displays. Professor Mark Welker believes that $150 per unit is too much and that Vitis is not a desirable IDE, so the Senior Design project was set to create a cheaper replacement ($70 per unit) with an accompanying workspace, library, and lab manual for future students to use with the new IDE (NXP Xpresso and/or VSCode).
The NXP Integration team’s job is the creation, testing, and documentation of the necessary workspace and library. We confirm the compatibilities between NXP’s provided libraries and customize them as needed, we test the reliability of the inputs and outputs of the peripherals, and we will be writing the lab manual for the future students to use. The Microprocessors course only has a basic C++ course as the prerequisite coding background, so the sdk library and documentation must be thoroughly checked to ensure the students can focus on studying the course material instead of troubleshooting code beyond their level.
