Henrique Reis

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5 years, 9 months ago.

EFM32G Gecko

New to this. Stumbled onto mbed and it looks really good. I understand that Mbed is compatibility with a select number of Silicon Labs microcontrollers.

I’m putting together a test board based around the Gecko microcontroller....is it possible to use Mbed to program a stand-alone Gecko microcontroller?

Thanks for the guidance.

2 Answers

Henrik Sørensen
5 years, 9 months ago.

Good question! I'm new to mbed myself, and have the same question. I certainly would expect a definite yes, otherwise mbed would just be a demo environment of little practical use. /Henrik

Paul Staron
5 years, 9 months ago.

Almost all the boards on MBED will allow you program an external MCU, STM is probably the easiest and most versatile along with the (Freescale) FRDM boards which I have done many times.

STM swd interface is not target dependent one board will program all the MCU's and you can also use the STM32 STM-LINK UTILITY in addition to the MBED drag and drop.

EFM32 also looks straight forward but it may only program the one target that is on the board same as the FRDM boards, I haven't checked yet so don't get a different MCU to the STK kit that you have, get the exact type and same memory, but package size is not important depending on how many pins you need and if you can actually solder it to a PCB, 64 pin LQFP is a reasonable size, QFN is very tricky to solder.

The document link below shows how to do it using the EFM32 boards. This information is on Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio if you install it. Connect your board and all the documentation becomes available.

https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/application-notes/AN1011-efm32-standalone-programmer.pdf

See Section 5.1 the operation switch must be in the 'BAT' position to power down the board MCU. Then simply connect your external project MCU as indicated.

GND, RESET, SWDIO, SWCLK, VDD

Thanks for your post. However my question isn’t really on programming it with a programmer. This is something I know how to do using SWD and a J-Link programmer.

I have built my own prototype using the EFM32G (gecko) processor and I am able to program using the Simplicity Sutdio IDE and flash the prototype using the J-link programmer.

My question is that I use the Gecko processor, but Mbed seems to only use development boards, and I don’t see that it can be used specifically for the Gecko microcontroller. However, I see snippets on the web of people who seem to have programmed it. But there is no clear How-To’s anywhere.

I don’t know if I can just pick a board that is close enough to the Gecko , like perhaps the Leopard Gecko board. What are the pitfalls, or other things I may need to know. Or, if it is even possible until Mbed builds something for it.

Thanks

posted by Henrique Reis 30 Jan 2019

If you have a Leopard Gecko board and you have a custom board with the same Leopard Gecko MCU and clock crystals set up, then the code you develop on MBED with the SiLabs board will work the same on your custom board.

The development boards are exactly that, for developing, debug and testing your code, then using that code on you custom board. However some will actually use the development boards for low volume projects, can work out cheaper.

There are no pitfalls providing you have a well designed custom board, good track layout to avoid signal crosstalk and well decoupled power (Vcc) lines.

The MBED EFM32 libraries are not as comprehensive as what's available on Simplicity Studio, for instance I had to write my own BuRTC library. Also I struggle a bit with the way some of the power saving code works, but that's just me. I'm sure Simplicity Studio is fine if you are a good programmer, I'm not that good and find MBED easy(ish) and very quick, and you get free use of the Keil compiler.

posted by Paul Staron 31 Jan 2019