Product Evaluation——Fireduino Development Board

I believe most of the engineers have played Arduino. At least, they should have heard of it. Arduino is an open source hardware products, widely used by worldwide engineers. in my impression, Arduino is not only a simple product, it is more like a representative of open source hardware with symbolic meaning .

At present, many of the original semiconductor manufacturers or third-party design companies are all develop their boards to compatible with Arduino UNO expansion interface . After all, Arduino's extensive ecosystem extended a number of interesting peripherals , you can seamlessly dock Arduino expansion interface to achieve many functions. In the meantime,More and more people use this ecosystem .As a result,manufacturers have to  imitate to compatible with Arduino, which can be considered as “Needs change the product”.

Fireduino development board

Fireduino development board with simple kraft cardboard packaging, low-key appearance, the front is the Firefly team Logo.

The box has a Fireduino development board and a miniUSB interface cable.

The Firedunio board looks simple but not simple, IC devices are "neat" layout on the PCB board, which can be regarded as a style Firefly team, the board in the details of the treatment is great , a number of interfaces have a corresponding function of the silk screen marking. The size of the board is quite satisfactory, 108.8 x 53.4mm.

To talk about its characteristics, the following figure is a good interpretation of the characteristics of the board, a Fireduino = 2 x Arduino UNO + Wifi module + audio module + RTC module + Flash module.

Fireduino has various interfaces, including I2C, SPI, ADC, GPIO, UART, PWM, and LCD and touch screen interfaces ,which are fully compatible with Arduino. In addition, software functions enable each GPIO to implement PWM functions. But to be honest, why the Fireduino will be equal to two Arduino UNO, just simply refers that Fireduino expansion interface is almost equivalent to two Arduino UNO expansion signal?

The most representative function of the board is equipped with the audio circuit, the audio codec chip is Rising Micro RKNANOD chip, which is a high-end-oriented HIFI-level codec chip.

RKnanoD audio codec controller

RKnanoD is an audio codec controller, using 55nm process, integrated two Cortex-M3 processor, one as the system core, one as the calculation of the core.here is some points not too clear, Rising micro-official information provided in the display system “The maximum frequency of the core is 200MHz, the calculation of the core of 400MHz“; but in the Firefly official website,you can see FireDonin onboard RKnanoD system Fengyun maximum frequency of 250MHz, and the calculation of the maximum frequency of up to 500MHz core.

AP6181 2.4GHz WiFi module, the size of 12 x 12mm, support IEEE802.11b / g / n protocol, using SDIO interface.

Fireduino More Interface Details:

Reset / DC JACK / MicroUSB / MicroSD / UPGRADE button / microphone

Power Button / Headphone Out / Audio Out / Audio In * 2 / WiFi Antenna

Fireduino is powered on

You can see two LED interactive flashing

Let us through a flashing small LED program to test  if the Fireduino download system is convenient.

To see the schematic, for example, GREEN LED,the signal SPI1B_CLK.

when you download the program,please note that

1.Pin13： which is Arduino IDE tools need to set

2.It should be noted that Arduino IDE need to run as an administrator

3.After the first program is  downloaded , the computer will install Fireduino USB to the serial driver,but it can be downloaded directly through the serial number in the future.

Of course, we can get a basic understanding of Fireduino development through this small program. the official web also provides a detailed introductory .Then we come to experience the FireDuino board about some important features.

Fireduino, on-board HiFi audio codec chip, complete audio circuit, WiFi module, RTC clock / calendar IC, SPI Flash and other resources, and has 50pin expansion interface for the players toss, Fireduino also has a complete guide and a wealth of routine code, applications, compatible with the popular Arduino IDE tools, and adapt Firefly launched graphical programming tools . even if the engineers who are not good at code can easily use it.

 Author ：Yvonne Woo — WIN SOURCE ELECTRONICS