Overview

This is similar to my other product--RX210 LaunchPad 2XL but meant to adapt to the Renesas RDKRX62N demo board for the RX62N microcontroller. It only has 1 set of 40-pin LaunchPad headers. This chip is more capable than the aforementioned RX210 and the Renesas demo board (not included) breaks out most of its features fairly well; onboard 10/100Mbps Ethernet, CAN, audio output hardware, RS-232 level shift interface, microSD card slot and more. There are 3 expansion headers for adding additional gadgets and this adapter board takes advantage of them by exposing a TI LaunchPad-style interface.

The Renesas RX62N is a 32-bit microcontroller which competes with the ARM Cortex-M4F in features and power. This board runs at 96MHz. 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 RX62N MCU here

Marketing literature "competitive fact sheet"

Details

This board includes the PCB and all headers needed to attach the board to a fresh RDKRX62N board (not included) as well as the 40-pin LaunchPad headers.

The right-side headers are typically shared between SPI and I2C functions on TI LaunchPads. To allow the user to select between them, a pair of jumpers have been included. Only SPI or I2C may be used at a time, however the UART pins do have Simple SPI/I2C capabilities.

There are 2 errors on this board to keep in mind. The pin in the lower left, P51, just happens to also be the RESET pin used to suspend/unsuspend the onboard graphic LCD and Ethernet PHY controller. This is unfortunate because it is one of the outer headers and is used often by BoosterPacks. The other error is in the labeling--the "Timer" pins on the inner header of the right side are not all timer pins as it turns out--some are Port Output Enable pins which are related to timer functionality but do not output PWM (they are inputs used to cancel the output of other PWM pins).