If you are tasked with creating a safety-critical design for applications from automotive (eg. braking) to industrial (eg. hazardous gas monitoring), or medical (eg. ECG monitor), selecting appropriate MCUs can be challenging. The Hercules family of dual core lockstep ARM® Cortex™-R4 based MCUs with its advanced integrated safety features is designed specifically for ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 safety-critical applications.
The new Hercules LaunchPad is a low-cost evaluation platform for TI's line of safety MCUs. With the included example code and demo software, developers can start playing with the Hercules MCUs right out of the box.
The evaluation kit is currently available for the Hercules TMS570 series MCU (used for safety-critical transportation applications), and for the Hercules RM4 series MCU (used for safety-critical industrial and medical applications).
The LaunchPad is USB powered and features on-board emulation. This allows you to debug the MCU without the need for additional tools. It has a 40-pin expansion header for connectivity to compatible BoosterPacks for add functionality like wireless and displays. There is a general-purpose switch, reset switch, an ambient light sensor and two on-board LEDs for quick development and testing.
The Hercules TMS570LS04x/03x LaunchPad has the following features:
- Dual core lockstep ARM Cortex-R4 based TMS570 series MCU featuring:
- ECC on Flash and RAM interfaces
- Built-in self-test for CPU and on-chip RAMs
- Error signaling module with error pin
- Voltage and clock monitoring
- 80 MHz operation
- 384kB Flash with ECC
- 32kb RAM with ECC
- 16kB flash with ECC for EEPROM emulation
- 16 channel 12-bit ADC
- 19 pin programmable timer
- LIN/SCI (UART)
- Enhanced Quadrature Encoder Pulse (eQEP) Module
- GIO pins
- On-board ambient light sensor
- 40-pin BoosterPack connector
- Footprint for an expansion header
The Hercules RM42x LaunchPad has the same features with the distinction of having an RM4 series MCU capable of operating at up to 100MHz.
The LaunchPads are USB powered and come pre-programmed with the Hercules Safety MCUs demo. This allows users to easily learn more about the safety, data acquisition, and control features of the Hercules MCU platform.
Also available is HALCoGen, which provides a graphical user interface allowing the user to configure peripherals, interrupts, clocks and other microcontroller parameters. When the device is configured, the user can generate peripheral initializations and driver codes, which can then be imported into CCS.
Hercules LaunchPad is compatible with many of the existing BoosterPacks in the TI's LaunchPad ecosystem. Software drivers are available for demos using Educational BoosterPack which includes an accelerometer, an LCD display, tri-color LEDs and some other features. Other available BoosterPacks:
- 2.7” OLED display
- Contactless infrared MEMS temperature sensor
- SPI Digital potentiometer
- Sub-1GHz RF module
- Serial Bluetooth module 2.4GHz RF and LCD module
- and many others
Given its price at just $20, the LaunchPad offers a surprisingly versatile, full-featured evaluation platform for Hercules MCUs targeted towards safety-critical designs. Additionally, with the availability of free state-of-the-art software tools and reasonably-priced BoosterPacks, it makes for a complete development environment. For the full solution, get access to LaunchPad EVMs, or download Code Composer Studio, and HALCoGen software.