Renesas Electronics has designed a new DC-DC LED control demonstration kit based on the RL78/I1A microcontroller (MCU). The kit enables system designers to experience the benefits of MCU-based solutions for LED driver development. They can also learn about LED constant-current control and various methods of dimming using the lighting-specific RL78/I1A MCUs.
An important feature of the kit is the new version of a comprehensive and easy-to-use software GUI tool, called the Applilet EZ for HCD. The tool enables very easy graphical configuration of an LED lighting system while also generating pre-compiled C code for the MCUs. It enables system designers to program the target device using only a USB cable, and to generate communication protocol stacks for DALI and DMX512 in seconds.
The evaluation board included in the kit is based on the 38-pin R5F107DE device with 64 KB of Flash memory. It implements efficient circuits to demonstrate programmable 3-channel LED constant 350 mA current control in buck converter topology, using the 16-bit PWM timers running at 64 MHz and set to the dithering function to further improve the average resolution to under a nanosecond.
The board also provides a number of dedicated analog peripherals integrated on-chip, such as a programmable gain amplifier and comparators. The internal architecture of the devices reduces the code size and frees up the CPU to execute other instructions in the background. Four types of dimming interfaces are supported by the board to demonstrate the flexibility of the solution. They comprise DALI, DMX512, IR remote control and analog volume.
The evaluation board supports an onboard debug function via the USB interface by using the IAR C-SPY debugger, eliminating the need for additional hardware. It allows Flash programming and supports standard debug functions such as code execution, single stepping, software breakpoints and memory manipulation. In addition, the board also supports debugging using the E1 emulator. The board includes the IAR Embedded Workbench for the RL78 MCU with a code size limitation of 16 KB, as well as the IAR C-SPY debugger.
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