Luminaire: A tale of woe

Original Idea: Luminaire

My original idea can be found at: https://www.hackster.io/challenges/KinetisFlexIO/ideas/3499

Essentially, it consisted of a project which would have as a goal to measure the time when the primary light in a room is turned on, and measure when the room is occupied to determine when energy is wasted.

First Challenge: Bricked board (Thanks to Windows 10)

The first issue I had occurred shortly after receiving the board. The same day that it arrived in the mail, after installing all the software, and running a couple examples, I started having issues with the board. I tried to replace the CMSIS-DAP with J-Link, but the board became bricked. I (much) later (after finally fixing the issue using a SWD adapter, which I bought on Ebay) discovered that this was a known issue with the use of Windows 10 with the board, and that I had essentially followed the procedures described in the 4th webinar to fix the issue.

Second Challenge: No SWO (Apparent lack of SWO support on board)

Another issue I had was that, when starting debugging in KDS, a message would appear stating that SWO features were not present on the emulator. Due to this, I was not able to use PRINTF() to help debug and create programs.

Second and a half Challenge: No SWO part 2 (No SWO output using separate probe)

After running into my second challenge, I tried switching from the on-board K20 as programmer to programming the K82 using the K82 debug port, with the aforementioned SWD debug probe. However, once again I was not able to make it work. Even using the SWO viewer included with the J-Link software, there were no messages present. I tried using other creators' software, which should work, but to no avail.

Third Challenge: Inexperience (I don't know enough about the platform, and how to program it)

One of the biggest limitations I encountered was my lack of experience programming in a more pure C++. Primarily using the Arduino IDE had trained me to think about programming MCUs in a specific way.

Conclusion: Thanks for the opportunity

In the end, I received one of the free Freedom Dev Board, but I was not able to complete the project due to the reasons presented above. I hope that, in the future, I will be able to learn more about this platform and that I will finish the project that I have started. I've learned that if something can go wrong, it will.

If I've made any mistakes in reasoning or method, or ways in which I could make things work, please leave a comment.

Once again, thanks to the people at Hackster.io and NXP, this contest has been an amazing learning experience.