Overview

So you have an RX210 promo board you got from Avnet recently and have no idea what to do with it. Maybe you also have some TI LaunchPads and boosterpacks. Why not combine them? It's like having a LaunchPad with 512K flash and 64K SRAM!

This board enables you to attach TI BoosterPacks to a Renesas RX210 Promo Board (link to purchase).

It provides two 40-pin "XL" style LaunchPad header sets designed to comply with TI's BoosterPack standard -- TI Build-Your-Own-BoosterPack

The Renesas RX210 is a 32-bit microcontroller which competes roughly with the ARM Cortex-M4 in features and power. It runs up to 50MHz and contains onboard oscillators in addition to supporting external crystals. The architecture was designed from the ground up but borrows peripherals from Hitachi and Mitsubishi 32-bit microcontrollers, and it is marketed by Renesas as the successor to the H8SX and M32C MCU families.

More about the Renesas RX architecture here

More specifically about the RX210 MCU here

Details

This board includes the PCB and all headers needed to attach the board to a fresh RPBRX210 board (not included) as well as the 40-pin LaunchPad headers.

The SPI/I2C pins on the right-side header are typically shared on the TI LaunchPads which can be confusing as you can't combine SPI and I2C boosterpacks if they both communicate using the right-side header. This board fixes the problem by attaching the requisite SPI/I2C pins on the upper LaunchPad to the RSPI peripheral, and the requisite pins on the lower LaunchPad to the RIIC (I2C) peripheral, so you can share SPI and I2C boosterpacks on the same project. In addition, the UART pins support Renesas "Simple SPI/I2C" implementation with the corresponding clock pin located in the correct location.

A non-standard feature has been added to the bottom LaunchPad header set; the addition of 2 pins inside the right header which support the MODE and UserBoot pins to support the creation of a BoosterPack that could enable programming of the chip with fully open-source tools via its built-in serial bootloader, as opposed to the onboard SEGGER J-Link which is only supported on Windows and Linux O/S's with closed-source software. I have an example of one listed in the pictures; this was etched at home with a toner-transfer method, but if there is interest I will produce a board through OSHpark to support this.

Support for the 5V rail present in 40-pin "XL" style LaunchPads is enabled by a jumper wire in the upper right corner; a 1x2 female header will be provided which may be soldered to the 5V and GND pins on the right side of the RPBRX210 board, and you can attach your jumper wire there. Powering the 5V rail from a BoosterPack will also power the onboard voltage regulator and send power to the SEGGER J-Link debugger as well (although the latter isn't accessible unless you plug into the onboard USB port on the bottom side).

Note Unfortunately the potentiometer on the RPBRX210 is not usable with this because the LaunchPad board covers it.

Use Cases

• Mid-range gadgets requiring the performance of a 32-bit processor while simultaneously supporting low-power sleep modes when appropriate. Something much more than an Arduino, something less than a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone.
• Designs that beg for an SPI implementation supporting more than 8 bits (it supports up to 32-bit SPI frames with automated driving of the Chip Select line).
• Maybe you need the offloading capability of its DMA controller or the Event Link Controller. Or maybe you need External Parallel Bus capability--this chip can do that.
• Designs that require the use of an RTOS; these chips are purposefully designed to support RTOS applications, and have support from several RTOS's including FreeRTOS.
• Designs that require basic DSP-type functionality as it includes multiply-accumulate. This CPU does not include an FPU; its big brother the "RX600" series has that (along with higher power consumption, onboard USB and Ethernet, CAN, etc).