NEC Electronics Announces Shine it! demo kit

Shine It! includes a small form factor demonstration board based on the µPD78F8024 microcontroller and several other NEC Electronics components including MOSFETs which are available in different sizes and packages to drive current in the range of 300mA to 1.5A.

The solution benefits from a wide supply voltage range from 9 to 38V, and is capable of delivering up to 1MHz switching frequency using an on-chip oscillator, allowing use of small size external inductors for each LED channel, thus saving significant PCB space and system cost. A number of tiny discrete components are populated on the board to demonstrate size and cost benefits.

The board also offers a flexible LED configuration including on-board RGBW LEDs, connectors for external LED modules and off-the-shelf LED light engines. An additional benefit of the board is the versatile control method of the 4 channels of high current LED drivers. The board demonstrates the control of the LEDs using the on board temperature or ambient light sensors, DMX512 interface, RS232 link or ZigBee™ wireless communications.
NEC Electronics’ Shine It! demonstration kit also includes a very comprehensive and easy to use software GUI tool, called Applilet EZ. In three easy steps the tool is used to graphically configure the board, automatically generate the source code using the IAR compiler and program the target using a USB connection. Applilet EZ allows graphical configuration of different dimming control options. The dimming can be either set to fixed values for each channel independently, or configured for dynamic adjustments using on-chip ADCs or serial interfaces such as I2C, UART, DMX512 or CSI. Developers can also create custom dimmer controls by manually drawing the duty cycle for each channel using the flexible Applilet EZ tool.

The Shine it! Demonstration kit is available now.