NEC Electronics' new 78K Primer Kit

14th April 2009

ES Admin

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NEC Electronics has announced the release of the 78K Primer Kit. This learning tool introduces NEC Electronics’ industry-leading 78K microcontroller family and is designed to help and educate newcomers to get started quickly and easily both with 78K0 8-bit and the 78K0R 16-bit microcontrollers. The 78K Primer Kit is designed for engineers and students who are not yet familiar with NEC Electronics’ 78K microcontrollers. The kit holds hardware materials, development tools, software tools and documentation such as presentations and tutorials.

78K Primer Kit contains two target boards which are basic evaluation boards for 78K devices that allow elementary interface circuitry to be added. The first one is fitted with the 78K0/KF2 8-bit microcontroller while the second one is fitted with the 78K0R/KG3 16-bit microcontroller. These target boards support on-board debugging and Flash programming using the development tool Minicube2, which is also provided within the 78K Primer Kit

A small bag of components is also included in the kit, to quickly and simply evaluate some major peripherals by interfacing them to the target boards. Examples of these components are a photodiode that can be interfaced to the A/D converter to measure ambient light, a thermal sensor to measure temperature by communicating to the microcontroller using the I2C protocol, and a buzzer that can be controlled with a 16-bit Timer output port. For each of these components, a connection diagram is provided as well as a ready to use sample code to understand how to program the peripherals.

The 78K Primer Kit CD-ROM also includes software tools such as the IAR Embedded Workbench® 16KB code size limited Kickstart version for 78K microcontrollers and Applilet®2 for both 78K0/Kx2 and 78K0R/Kx3 devices, which is a tool to generate device driver code to initialize and use on-chip peripherals. Furthermore the CD-ROM comprises a QB-Programmer, which is an easy-to-use Flash programming tool to program the on-board Flash memory.

In addition to these software tools, the CD-ROM contains dedicated presentation materials and tutorials, for both 78K0 8-bit and 78K0R 16-bit microcontrollers. The sections deal with the range of 78K microcontrollers, 78K architecture, peripherals, Flash technology, development tools and support provided by NEC Electronics Europe. The tutorials have been written to learn basic but essential subjects such as creating a demo project for IAR Embedded Workbench®, debugging with the on-chip debug emulator Minicube2, generating code using Applilet2 and also programming a device with QB-programmer using Minicube2.

The flexibility of the 78K Primer Kit combined with a number of demonstration projects included in the kit enables developers to rapidly evaluate the 78K microcontrollers from different aspects and experiment with its peripherals. The new 78K Primer Kit is available now.