Back in September I wrote about the joint promotion that Renesas is running with Micrium called “The Power of Two.” If you haven’t already taken advantage of this great free offer—which now includes touchscreen support—now is a good time to take a second look: the offer expires March 31^st.

If you’re using an RX or RL78 in a commercial application and are living in the Americas you can…

Cloud Connectivity Part 3: Sharing Your Data

In earlier posts in this series we covered creating a dashboard; adding events and creating alerts; chatting with your device; and creating a Cloud script. In this post we’ll walk through sharing your data.

Sharing Your Data

This section shows users how data from one device can be shared with other devices or people.  Sharing data from one or more devices into…

In Part 1 of this series we walked through how to create a dashboard on Renesas.Exosite.com to control your RX or RL78 RDK; how to add an event; and how to create an email alert when the event occurs. In this post we’ll demonstrate how to chat with your device and how to create a Cloud script. The material is drawn from Hans Rempel’s two-hour Cloud Connectivity lab at Renesas DevCon.

Chat With Your Devic…

Machine to machine (M2M) communications over the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is exploding, with the number of machines communicating over the Internet predicted to quickly outnumber humans doing the same thing. Renesas has partnered with Exosite to add “Cloud support” for its RX62N, RX63N, and RL78G13/14 RDKs, enabling you to design remote sensing and control applications that communicate over the Internet.…

When cell phone makers started moving to non-replaceable batteries I started getting nervous. How can I recharge my phone quickly while I’m on the road and forgot to bring along a spare battery? The new Renesas RL78/G1C MCUs address that problem.

USB 2.0 supports charging at only 500 mA, which means that when the 3300 mAh battery in my phone is dead it could take over six hours to recharge. Fortunately the charging…

In the beginning was the 7-segment display, and it was good. Well, it was a step forward from Nixie tubes anyway. Today they’re about as outdated as their glowing orange predecessors, and unlike Nixie tubes nobody gets nostalgic about them.

Even the simplest embedded device needs a display with decent resolution, and more sophisticated ones need relatively high resolution in order to display more than a small…

As DevCon last week Renesas announced version 1.1 of its Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) e²studio. More than just an upgrade, Renesas plans to make e²studio the primary development platform for RL78, RX, SH, and RH850 MCUs, moving away from HEW and CubeSuite+. Renesas will continue to support the older tools but recommends using e²studio for any new designs. A Project Import function makes it straightforward…

Any time you need to add an LCD display—whether segmented or pixel-based—to a battery-powered portable device your battery life takes a major hit. In cell phones the display is usually the biggest power hog, ahead of the PA or even the processor running flat out. If you’re willing to trade off pretty colors for near-zero power consumption, E Ink’s “electronic paper” display may be just what the Doctor ordered.…

The new Renesas RL78/G14 RDK is clearly taking aim at cloud-based M2M communications, with an on-board GainSpan 802.11b Wi-Fi module; software that enables the board to work as either a web server or an access point; and a free portal on Exosite that lets you to intact with the board over the Internet.

When I started working with the board, Renesas’ Oliver Garreau sent me an email saying, “Do you mind if I send you…

Renesas has long been a leader in LED lighting solutions, with dedicated MCUs, driver ICs, MOSFETs, and diodes targeting lighting applications all the way from individual LEDs to complex industrial lighting systems.

To date Renesas’ workhorse for fluorescent and LED lights has been the 78K0/Ix2 low-cost, 8-bit All Flash MCU, with a 78K0 core operating at up to 20 MHz. The Renesas Interactive

course “Powering…

When your embedded design reaches a certain level of complexity an RTOS becomes unavoidable, even if you’d like to avoid the licensing expenses—not to mention the cost of connectivity stacks and other middleware. Renesas and Micrium just teamed up to help make that problem go away.

Effective today embedded developers designing with Renesas RX or RL78 MCUs can register to get a free, single-product lic…

The days of breadboarding are pretty much over when you can get not one but a variety of boards with various peripherals that let you evaluate an MCU or even develop full-fledged projects using them. Renesas offers a large number of such boards, grouped as Renesas Promotion Boards, Renesas Starter Kits, and Renesas Demonstration Kits. Each has its place in a different stage of the design process.

Renesas Promotion…

Almost any embedded development project requires storing your code in the MCU’s flash memory.  There are two ways to program the flash memory in an RL78 using an external device:

• Writing to flash using a flash memory programmer
• Writing to flash using an external device that incorporates a UART

The RL78 incorporates firmware that controls flash memory programming, which in turn involves exchanging commands…

The RL78 internal temperature sensor provides a cost effective method of measuring temperatures.

The internal temperature sensor on the RL78 provides a voltage that is proportional to temperature; its nominal output voltage is 1.05V at 25°C with its output voltage changing -3.6mV/°C.

The output of the sensor is connected directly to the RL78’s ADC. Determining the temperature is a two-step process:…

In addition to being flexible, fast, and ultra-low-power, the RL78 has a number of important safety functions, including:

• Flash memory CRC operation function (high-speed CRC, general-purpose CRC)
• RAM parity error detection function
• RAM guard function
• SFR guard function
• Invalid memory access detection function
• Frequency detection function
• ADC test function

Let’s take a look at each of them in turn.…

On RL78 MCUs I/O port pins and peripheral function pins scale up from the smallest (20) to the largest (128) pin count while maintaining the Logical Port Pin numbering and keeping peripheral pin physical (PCB) layout in the same order/position as the pin count is increased.  Therefore a designer can target a smaller pin count but add I/O pins and functionality by migrating to a larger pin count without requiring a revamp…

Most microcontrollers power down the CPU as often as possible to conserve power; however they normally need to return to active mode periodically to poll peripherals for incoming data and transfer it to registers where it can be processed; all of this takes time, burdens the CPU, and consumes energy. The RL78/G14 incorporates a unique Data Transfer Controller (DTC) that transfers data without going through the CPU. The…

While the RL78 is known primarily for its ultra-low-power capabilities, it also provides multiple clock options that enable efficient system design. Depending on the chip version the RL78 clock generator provides up to four different oscillators:

• A main system clock oscillator (OSC) running at up to 20 MHz
• An internal selectable on-chip oscillator (OCO) that can run between 1 and 32 KHz
• An internal “low speed…

One of the key features of the RL78 is the Snooze Mode, which enables an RL78/G13 MCU to achieve over 30% average system power reduction compared to an implementation without this Mode. If you Snooze you lose—power consumption, which of course is the whole idea. So how does it work, and how and under what circumstances can you take advantage of it?

The RL78/G13 has three power management Modes: Halt, Snooze,…

We've discussed the issue of safety standards previously. Safety certification is required in applications that span every-day appliances to industrial systems. And in microcontroller (MCU)-based systems, you need self-test routines that ensure that your design doesn't enter an unsafe operating mode. We've covered the features of the RL78 MCU family that specifically target fault detection. Today let's discuss…

We previously discussed some of the differentiating characteristics of the RL78/G14 branch of the RL78 microcontroller (MCU) family relative to the RL78/G13 branch. One item that I mentioned in passing, but didn't discuss in detail, was the difference in how the two handle multiplication and division. If you have a math-intensive application, then the G14 branch may indeed be a better choice.

All RL78 MCUs include…

Renesas has announced the RL78 Green Energy Challenge in partnership with Circuit Cellar Magazine and Elektor Magazine. The design contest will reward entrants developing low-power-centric projects with $20,000 in cash prizes along with weekly prizes to be drawn at raffle. The contest began this week, and winners will be announced at the Renesas Developers Conference (DevCon) scheduled for October in Anaheim, CA.

We are starting to see some differentiation in the RL78 microcontroller (MCU) family both in terms of new features in new general-purpose groups such as the RL78/G14 group and application-specific features such as LCD support in the RL78/L12 group. All of the RL78 family includes many of the low-power-centric features that we've discussed, but you will find differentiation to your advantage for a specific application. Today…

I recently wrote about the Low Voltage Detector (LVD) circuit on the RL78 microcontroller (MCU) family and how you can use the low-power feature to ensure reliable system operation in the event of low-voltage conditions that might be commonly experienced in battery-powered applications. The post got a bit long for the blog, yet there were topics yet to be discussed such as how to configure the LVD. So let's revisit the…

Today let's step away from the low-power theme that has pervaded our discussions on the RL78 microcontroller (MCU) and focus on flexibility – specifically relative to the Timer Array Unit (TAU) architecture. Now the TAU operation falls within the low-power story in terms of use of the timer functions during run mode. But it's the flexible, multi-channel architecture that will be our primary subject here.…