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RX71M Revelation Kit - Easy Evaluation and Development including TFT and Free GUI Software

If you purchase the Revelation Kit (125-8413) , you will receive a quite powerful development board with the 32-bit RX71M microcontroller by Renesas. As you have already noticed by the kit image, the board is equipped with a QVGA TFT display, which you can operate by touch. The touch screen utilized is not the capacitive touch (which you may know from your smartphones) technology but the more cost efficient resistive touch solution, which does a good job on this kit.

Demos

The board comes with a pre-installed graphical demo application with two different modes. (To change the mode simply press and hold the SW1 button on the backside while powering on the board).

Demo 1: GAPI Demonstration

  • Renesas Graphics API is used for demonstration Graphical User Interfaces. The out of the box demo shows four different GAPI graphical user interface demos. Basically you could click on the button and choose the mode you want to explore. If no option is selected within 30 seconds, the auto demonstration mode will start.

Demo 2: Business Card Demonstration

  • Animated business card demonstration using user supplied imagesand text. The revelation board is recognised as a USB mass storage device if connected to PC USB port. The User is able to transfer images (JPEG) and text file to the FAT file system on the virtual USB mass storage drive inside the RX71M MCU. Once disconnected and restarted, it will display the new content.

Anyway, beside the exciting demo, your background to buy the kit was more the development than just playing around with it at your side. I have to say that the Revelation kit keeps all given promises as a rapid prototyping platform.

Development Environment

The provided e2 studio is an Eclipse based development environment, with state of the art features. So if you already know Eclipse, you will feel familiar with e2 studio.

As the Revelation Kit encompasses the integrated E2 Lite JTAG debugger, it is ensures that you need nothing else than the kit hardware to do your development.

PCB on a glance

The application header foot print on the left and right side allows you to extend the board with your own designed hardware or you might want to use the provided PMOD expansion headers to add existing PMOD modules to the kit for your application purposes.

No external Memory required

In case you do look out on the PCB for the external SRAM or SDRAM for the TFT video buffer purpose, note that you cannot find it, since the Revelation Kit simply doesn’t have any external memory for that purpose. In fact, the embedded 552kB SRAM of the RX71M MCU will be used for that purpose, leaving enough performance as well as memory for the application design, too.

Free Get started Book

I definitely recommend that you download the “Get started” book from the Renesas webpage. You can find the English PDF download here: https://solution.renesas.eu/rx71m-guide-b

Good news for those users with German background, there is also the option to download the German “Get Started” book, too.

This book is quite useful, since it guides you step by step from installing the tool chain, setting up basic knowledge of the Revelation Kit and you will learn how to implement three projects step by step.

Free Middleware and driver

You will especially like the fact that you do not have to program the microcontroller manually. In the Peripheral Code Generator (Web link: https://www.renesas.com/en-eu/products/software-tools/tools/code-generator/code-generator-plug-in.html) you can set the desired option, and then the source code is generated based on your choices.

However, with more complex projects, you cannot avoid to write code yourself. To facilitate the work, the Firmware Integration Technology (FIT) (Web link: https://www.renesas.com/en-eu/solutions/rx-applications/fit.html ) provides numerous libraries including USB and Ethernet stacks making the web search for required software pieces almost unnecessary.

Sample Project

I especially like the detailed project description where e.g. the embedded ADC is used to read the temperature from an integrated sensor. The temperature data will be written into a file in the FAT structure inside the internal Flash memory. Once the board is connected to a PC and the log file can be transferred via a USB mass storage connection at the CN3 port to your PC. This project uses the Peripheral Code Generator as well as FIT. The projects are available for download at http://www.renesas.com/revelation so that you can follow along.

Conclusion

The Revelation Kit is a cool basement for your own designs, as it includes all required items to make a perfect start:

  • Powerfull 32bit RX71M MCU with 4MB Flash and 552kB RAM
  • QVGA 320x240 TFT with resistive touch screen
  • On board JTAG debugger
  • Easy to use PCB with expansion headers
  • Free of charge development environment (limited to 128kB Flash code after 60days)
  • Free Get started Book
  • Free Middleware and driver

Have a nice and successful engineering day!

P.S.: Further details as well as the board schematic, demo projects, manuals etc can be found at: http://www.renesas.com/revelation

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