RL78 Blog - Blog

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…embedded devices were single-threaded, standalone, and relatively straightforward to design. Those days are clearly over. With 50 billion connected devices predicted for 2020—the so-called Internet of Things (IoT)—even the most deeply embedded systems will face issues with scalability, modularity, connectivity, and reliability that were far more manageable in the past.…

Simplicity and complexity may be logical opposites, but customers expect the most complex, feature-rich applications to be simple and intuitive to use. Slick user interfaces are the norm in consumer devices, but commercial and industrial control systems are starting to catch up. With the Internet of Things (IoT) promising to be the Next Big Thing (NBT), design engineers need some way to overlay their complex designs with…

The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to be the Next Big Thing (NBT), with as many as 50 billion connected devices online by 2025. Only one problem: the Internet of People (IoP?) has already gobbled up most of the available IP address spaces.

The current 32-bit IPv4 makes available 2³² or approximately 4.3 billion IP addresses, not nearly enough to enable the massive machine-to-machine (M2M) communication that…

If any field has been moving swiftly it’s low-power design. No matter how involved you are in the field there’s always something more to learn. Unfortunately the learning process is usually haphazard and time consuming: reading datasheets, articles, white papers, and books and searching numerous web sites.

Renesas has set out to address this problem with DevCon Extension 2014, a series of short courses and…

At my annual checkup recently I was curious just how that little pulse oximeter they clipped on my fingertip worked. How can they measure blood oxygen without taking a blood sample?

The hemoglobin in red blood cells binds oxygen to iron to carry oxygen throughout the body. As the oxygen is discharged the color of the red cells changes. Oximeters use two LEDs—flashing at alternative intervals—and a photodetector to…

Embedded designs keep getting more complex, but fortunately the tools for crafting them keep getting better. Renesas has just updated its Eclipse-based e²studio IDE to take advantages of the latest Kepler release as well version 8.3 of the Eclipse Code Development Toolkit (CDT). E²studio version v3.0 adds a number of new plugins and features that greatly expand the power of the program.

With 12 pages of release notes…

Portable designs have long been hampered by the laws of supply and demand—an insufficient supply of energy and an excess of demand for it. Battery technology hasn’t progressed much since the advent of Li-Ion cells, and unless you’re comfortable with a thorium-based energy source there isn’t a lot of room for improvement.

On the demand side semiconductor engineers have made great strides over the…

With an average modern automobile containing 50-100 MCUs—many of which stay powered up even when the engine is off—it’s imperative that they be as low power as possible, especially when they’re powered down. Drawing less than 200 μA/MHz RL78 MCUs fit this profile nicely.

Renesas has a long history in the automotive market, going back at least as far as the NEC V850 and 78K0. Since 2004 they…

In case you missed the last Renesas DevCon—or missed some important tracks—or just need to get back up to speed, Renesas is doing its best to bring the content directly to you. Starting next month and throughout the remainder of the year Renesas will be presenting DevCon Extension 2014—40 one-day sessions in Canada, the U.S., and Brazil. Each day will consist of short courses and hands-on labs in one of five…

Renesas’ RL78/L12 MCUs set out to integrate an LCD driver circuit alongside the CPU without sacrificing the ultra-low-power credentials of the RL78 product line—not an easy trick to accomplish. The LCD circuit adds just another 0.61 μA due to internal voltage boost, a 30% saving over competitive products.

Renesas’ new RL78/L12 Promotion Board includes a multi-part demo program that shows off many…

Low-power sensor networks are increasingly used to monitor machinery on assembly lines, stresses in buildings and bridges, inventory movement, patient vital signs, environmental changes, and myriad other applications. The ultra-low-power RL78/G14 was designed with these applications in mind. By taking advantage of the RL78’s Data Transfer Controller (DTC) to transfer the ADC converted results to RAM  the CPU can…

All but the most deeply embedded applications generally require an LCD screen to indicate status, report errors, or indicate the response to a command. Renesas RL78/L12 MCUs include an on-chip LCD driver/controller, making them a natural for consumer and industrial devices that require a fast, low-power MCU with a visual interface.

RL78/L12 MCUs run at up to 24 MHz, consuming just 75 μA/MHz in active mode; 0.64 μA…

Just in time for the holidays, Renesas has introduced a new development kit that should be a hit. Rather than go on about it, here's a quick video that explains it all--in the spirit of the season:

www.youtube.com/watch

Did you hear that Renesas was recently welcomed into the Energy@home association?

Energy@home is a non-profit organisation with the objective of the development and promotion of technologies and services for energy efficiency in the home based upon device to device communications.

As the world's number one supplier of microcontrollers, and a provider of award-winning smart grid communications technologies, Renesas is…

Renesas’ announcement this week of its ultra-low-power RL78/L1C got my attention, but I stopped short of doing a teardown of my son’s somewhat bulky blood glucose meter. With the PCB taking up much of its height, it could be downsized considerably while still retaining a large LCD screen if the components were better integrated. Better battery life would be a plus, too. The RL78/L1C was designed to deliver both…

All signal processing applications require some type of filtering, but hand coding filters is hardly a good use of your time. If you’re designing around an RL78 MCU, that needn’t be a problem.

Last June Renesas introduced the RL78 Digital Signal Controller Library – Fixed Point and Motor including source code. They’ve now released the RL78 Digital Signal Controller Library – Filter, including…

For the last month or so I’ve been migrating projects from HEW to e²studio 2.0 and learning the numerous bells and whistles of that program. So I was slow off the mark to follow up on Renesas’ announcement that it’s expanded its highly popular Power of Two program to include a free license for IAR Embedded Workbench for RX and RL78 MCUs. You’d think the word free would have gotten my attention.

Renesas…

The recent release of e² studio 2.0 represents a major upgrade to an already very capable program. Renesas re-architected the program from its previous version—which was based on Eclipse Helios—to support Juno (v. 3.8) and Eclipse C/C++ Development Tools (CDT v. 8), supporting all the advances in these two tool suites since their previous release. e²studio 2.0 supports the RL and RX families of Renesas MCUs…

As consumer devices keep getting smaller and smaller, so too must the devices inside them. With that in mind Renesas has just introduced the RL78/G10 product line in a tiny 10- and 16-pin pin SSOP packages with 1-4 KB of Flash memory and 128-512 Kbytes of RAM. In the process they also reduced the operating current by 30% from that of the RL78/G13 (66 µA/MHz @ 32 MHz) to 46 µA/MHz (@ 20 MHz).

While these…

Two key features of the RL78/G12 are its 8-channel 10-bit ADC with a 2.1 μsec conversion time; and a 2-channel DMA controller. Renesas has recently published an application note and a sample application that performs A/D conversion on four channels of analog input voltages, storing the A/D conversion results in the on-chip RAM through the DMA controller.

In addition to the application note you can download example…

If you’re going into production with your RL78-based design—or even running several different prototypes of it—you may well want to keep track of each different board. Using the Renesas Flash Programmer (RFP) tool you can program multiple codes that will each be incremented with for each new chip you flash. In this way you can keep track, for example, of the board number, the firmware version, even the place of origin…

This isn’t exactly news, but if DevCon was as much of a blur for you as it was for me you may have missed the winners and very interesting runners-up in the Renesas RL78 Green Energy Challenge. You can do some really cool stuff with those RL78G13/14 RDKs sitting on the shelf in your office.

Last evening I hit the couch after dinner and picked up the latest copy of elektor, which had the full particulars, including…

If you’ve been following this series of posts on the Arrow RL78 Intelligent Cloud Connectivity Kit you should now have your RL78G14 RDK talking nicely to your browser at the Renesas Development Board Portal on the Bug Labs site. In this installment we’ll create our own ‘swarm’ and add a second device to it. If you don’t have a second board you can at least see how this works.

Getting on…

Last week we wrote about Arrow’s RL78 Intelligent Cloud Connectivity Kit, consisting of an RL78G14 RDK and Bug Labs’ BUGswarm Internet connectivity software. The kit enables you control remote sensor-based devices—“swarms” of them even, to use Bug Labs’s preferred term—via Wi-Fi-based connections to the Internet. This time we’ll take a brief look at the software.

First…

I’m jumping the gun a bit on this blog post, but Renesas and Bug Labs have just introduced (though not yet promoted) the RL78 Intelligent Cloud Connectivity Kit, consisting of an RL78G14 RDK and Bug Labs’ BUGswarm Internet connectivity software. The kit is free to current or potential Arrow Electronics customers via their web site.

BUGswarm enables you to acquire data from and control embedded devices using…