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The Renesas EK-RA6M3 Evaluation Kit provides a flexible development board for evaluating features of the Renesas RA6M3 MCU group. The onboard RA6M3 microcontroller features a 120MHz Arm® Cortex®-M4 core with 2MB code flash, 640KB SRAM, and a variety of I/O peripherals including GPIO, Ethernet controller, DMA, USB, CAN, SCI, SPI, I2C, A/D and DAC, capacitive touch sensing, and TFT controller/2D accelerator/JPEG decoder. The board also has an Ethernet jack, USB High-Speed host and device, 32MB external QSPI flash, multiple 5V input sources, an onboard debugger, three user LEDs, and two user pushbuttons. Four types of ecosystem connectors provide standardized expansion capabilities including MikroElektronika™ mikroBUS, Digilent Pmod™ (SPI and UART), SeeedGrove® I2C, and Arduino Uno R3. Four sets of 40-pin headers provide direct access to the native MCU pins for easy testing and debugging.
The Renesas e2 studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE), in combination with the Renesas Flexible Software Package (FSP), supports software development for the EK-RA6M3. e2 studio provides an Eclipse-based editor, compiler, linker, and debugger for developing and debugging application code. FSP provides a reusable library of components to quickly build secure connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices using the Renesas RA family of Arm microcontrollers. Components include production-ready peripheral drivers, FreeRTOS and middleware stacks, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, TCP/IP and MQTT protocol stacks, USB middleware support for CDC, HID and Mass Storage Classes, secure connections through Mbed TLS, Arm PSA Cryptographic APIs and integrated hardware acceleration support, file systems, graphics processing, capacitive touch, and hardware drivers for a wide range of input/output peripherals. FSP packages can be assembled and configured in e2 studio using the integrated RA Configuration Editor tool, which generates source code for incorporation into your project.
The Medium One IoT Platform is a cloud-based platform designed to help early-stage developers prototype their IoT project or connect their existing hardware to the cloud. It offers an IoT Data Intelligence platform enabling customers to build IoT applications with less effort. Programmable workflows allow you to quickly build processing logic without having to create your own complex software stack. A graphical workflow builder and run-time engine let you process IoT data as it arrives and route or transform it as needed for your application. Workflow library modules are available for data analytics, charting, geolocation, weather data, MQTT, SMS text messaging, and integration with Twitter, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Snippets of Python code can create custom workflow modules. The web-based Workflow Studio, which provides a drag-and-drop visual programming environment, designs and builds end-to-end workflows. Workflow versioning and debugging tools support the development, test, and deployment lifecycle. REST APIs or MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol handle communications between IoT devices and the Medium One cloud. Configurable dashboards allow you to visualize application data and view real-time data in a variety of formats. Dashboard widgets for tabular data, charts, geopoint maps, gauges, and user inputs are included. Medium One’s iOS and Android apps allow you to build simple mobile app dashboards that can communicate with your devices through the platform.
To use your own EK-RA6M3 Evaluation Kit with the Medium One IoT Platform, check out our step-by-step article that walks you through the entire process of:
In this article, we also show you how to observe the published data on a real-time dashboard created in the Medium One environment. A set of next steps gives suggestions for how to extend and adapt the application for different IoT prototyping scenarios or to learn more.
Greg is an architect, engineer and consultant with more than 30 years experience in sensors, embedded systems, IoT, telecommunications, enterprise systems, cloud computing, data analytics, and hardware/software/firmware development. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Univ. of Notre Dame and a MS in Computer Engineering from the Univ. of Southern California.