NXP Config Tools: Your Engineering Sidekick

In this episode of EdgeVerse TechCast, co-hosts Kyle Dando and Bridgette Stone delve into the world of NXP MCUXpresso Config Tools. Joined by Petr Hradsky, the mastermind behind these tools from Brno, Czechia, they discuss how these utilities save time, reduce errors, and streamline workflow for embedded development. The episode covers the functionalities of Pin Tools, Clock Tools, and Peripheral Tools, and even touches on future enhancements such as Zephyr RTOS support. Engineers will learn how these configuration tools can simplify setup, validate configurations, and enhance cooperation between hardware and software teams.

• www.nxp.com/configtools
• https://www.nxp.com/design/design-center/development-boards-and-designs/i-mx-evaluation-and-development-boards/config-tools-for-i-mx-applications-processors:CONFIG-TOOLS-IMX 

00:00 Introduction to EdgeVerse TechCast
00:51 Meet the Expert: Petr Hradsky
01:47 Understanding NXP Config Tools
03:11 Deep Dive: PIN Tools
07:15 Exploring Clock Tools
10:16 Peripheral Tools and Their Benefits
12:51 Future Developments: Zephyr RTOS Support
13:52 Conclusion and Recap

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Hey everyone, and welcome backto the EdgeVerse, TechCast.
This is your trusted sourcefor everything, NXP software,
tools and enablement.
I am your co-host, Kyle Dando,and today we're covering one of
my favorite engineering sidekicks.
It is the NXP Config tools.
You can think of them as sort of Batman'sRobin for our NXP MCUXpresso IDE tools.

(00:35):
And I'm your otherco-host, Bridgette Stone.
I might be slightlyobsessed with these tools.
Don't judge me.
But by the end of the episode, we thinkyou'll understand why these utilities are
game changers for embedded development.
All right, Bridgette, Iwon't judge you, but uh.
To help us break it all down, we'rejoined by a good friend Petr Hradsky.

(00:55):
He is the brains behind the Config Tools.
He works with a great team inBrno and he'll introduce himself.
He's got firsthand knowledge ofhow these tools save time, reduce
errors, and streamline your workflow.
Petr, thanks for joining us.
Why don't you start by telling thelisteners a bit about yourself and how the
team in Brno got started with all this.

(01:19):
Hi.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I'm Petr Hradsky and I live inBrno, which is the second biggest
town in Czechia in Central Europe.
We have a long history of developingsoftware tools with our team here.
It originally started many years ago andwe started as a small startup company and,
we had a product called Processor Expert.

(01:39):
After some time we became part of theFreescale Corporation and, uh, later NXP.
Well, thanks for being here, Petr.
And I know out of all the tools NXPoffers, I feel like Config Tools
has the most straightforward name,but let's set the record straight.
What exactly are the Config Toolsand maybe what they are not?

(02:00):
Uh, the config tools are a suiteof tools, uh, in one application.
Uh, they can help during theembedded system hardware and
software design and implementation.
We actually provide twoflavors of this product.
We provide MCUXpresso Config Toolsand for microcontroller developers,
and Config tools for i.MX, which isa product for Application Processors.

(02:22):
You can get them free of charge asdesktop application for download
on our web, or you can use theonline version directly on the web.
If you are using MCUXpresso IDE,which is our development environment,
you can get the Config Toolsdirectly integrated inside this IDE.
Also popular is MCUXpresso Installerfor VS Code, which provides easy

(02:44):
way to get the correct tools whenyou are using the VS Code editor.
We need to make sure it's realeasy for our listeners and the
customers to get those tools.
So, Petr, you might not know this.
I was a hardware engineer in the Bay Area.
I was responsible for configuring thedevices on our hardware platforms so that
the software teams could get started.

(03:05):
And so I can easily relate to howthe requirements of the configuration
are handled by your tools.
None of them more important that I'vespent time with than the PIN tools.
The software team really relieson the hardware team getting
those pins properly set up.
How does the NXP config tool really helpin getting this important task completed?

(03:29):
Yeah, definitely the Pinstool can assist in many ways.
When you are a hardware engineer and youdevelop a new product, uh, you can use
the pins tool to explore the possibilitiesof the connections on the chip package,
because there can be multiple of them.
And you can check the availability ofsignals from individual peripherals.
Let's say you have a rough ideathat you need a specific number

(03:52):
of UARTs, SPI buses, PWM outputs,whatever, you know, and, you'd like
to ensure that it's actually possible.
As you mentioned the chips todaymake it so much more challenging
for developers because most ofthe chips are multifunction and
multiplexed, so the permutations of theconfiguration possibilities are endless.
So keeping track of that is reallyvaluable and it can be really

(04:16):
difficult for the engineers.
Yeah, that's correct, Kyle.
Also, as you are routing the pins, youcan add labels and see the used and free
pins graphically on the package diagram.
This can help in tracking those things.
And the pin tool can instantly check,uh, potential conflict so you can
ensure that it's possible to routethe chosen pins to peripherals.

(04:38):
And after you are satisfiedwith the pens configuration.
You can pass the safe configurationto your colleague who is
developing the software, andhe would really appreciate it.
We have received feedback from ourengineers that are working with
the customers that a Pins tool isvery useful for cooperation between
Hardware and Software developers.
And there are even more possibilities forfurther sharing the pins configuration,

(05:02):
you can create HTML report with atable of pins or export a table of
external signals as a spreadsheet file.
So, Petr, that must be a great way toassist the communication between the
hardware and the software engineers.
But once that is shared, whatcan the config tools do for
those software engineers?

(05:27):
If you're a software developer, thetool provides you the generative C
code with functions that initializethe pins to the state determined
by what you configured in the tool.
The preview of such functions inthe source code is available after
each change, highlighting howthe changes influence the code.
So you can call these functionsfrom your code or select

(05:49):
those that'll be automaticallycalled at application startup.
And afterwards, when you are writing theapplication code using the pins, you can
refer to the pins using the identifiersthat were provided by the hardware guy or
you provided them in the configuration.
Petr, I've heard great things abouthow the configuration tool helps with

(06:10):
our Evaluation and our FRDM boards.
Can you explain to the listenershow the tool is great for
working with these boards?
When a customer is using a boardfrom NXP, we have a nice feature
that's for visually showing theexpansion headers of the board.
You can discover how many pins areconnected from headers and you can even

(06:33):
interactively change the routing withouta need to look onto the schematics.
This can savor a lot of time, and Iremember myself when I was spending a lot
of time exploring schematics and lookingfor PDFs and searching how the connector
pins are connected to the MCU package.
So all this can be done even usingweb-based tool without actually installing

(06:55):
the desktop version of the Config tools.
Excellent.
, Same with you, Petr.
I had many days where I was squintingat PDF files, trying to find port names,
trying to figure out if I could makethe font larger on those symbols so you
could properly configure the device.
So having it in a nice, easy toview web tool is really powerful.

(07:16):
Well, speaking of things that can makeor break a design, timing is everything.
Literally.
So let's talk clock setup.
It's one of those things that feelssimple until you actually have to do it.
There's so much going on behind thescenes, PLLs, dividers ,and constraints.
How does the clocks tool helpdevelopers make sense of all

(07:36):
that without losing their minds?
The modern microcontrollers havemany options for timings and clocks.
It's important for having powerconsumption, computation spend,
and timing accuracy under control.
So, there can be multiple sourcesof clocks, like, multiple PLLs,
dividers, which can result inbillions of possible configurations.

(07:58):
And sometimes this can betoo much for the developer.
It sounds like a puzzle with a millioncombinations and only one right answer.
Exactly.
But, uh, our click tool provides agraphical representation that shows the
structure of the clocks on the chip.
However, this is not only seeingthe structure, the diagram is
interactive and you can configureindividual elements and see what

(08:21):
happens in the rest of the diagram.
What are the frequencies?
And also you can see what values will bewritten to control registers in case you
are interested in such low level details.
And the whole state of clocks isvalidated against the constraints of
the hardware and the tool immediatelyshows the problem when the configuration
wouldn't work on the real chip.

(08:43):
It's much faster thantrying it on the hardware.
In case you don't like to configureeach individual element, you can
just specify it and lock the desiredfrequencies and selected clock output.
And let the Clocks Tool do the job.
Searching the appropriate states ofelements like selectors, dividers, PLLs.
After the solution is successfullyfound, you can see the results and the

(09:06):
impact of each change to the whole clockstructure and resulting frequencies
and preview of the generated code.
You can create multiple alternativeclock configurations and the
tool generates initialization Ccode function for each of them.
It's up to you which of theseconfiguration we actually
use in the application code.
I'm sure our developersvery much appreciate that.

(09:27):
It's not only visualizing theconfig but validates it too.
No more trial and errorguessing on the Hardware.
That's a major win.
And Petr, one thing that me andmy team have seen when comparing
your clock configuration toolwith some of the competition is
it doesn't limit the settings.
Some of the other microcontroller clockconfiguration tools, they may seem at

(09:48):
the top level as very intuitive, butwhen people try to take advantage of
the chip, sometimes they're locked outof specific settings and they have to
go in and manually update the code.
So kudos to your team to provideengineers a very easy to use tool,
but something that can really get downinto those complex timing requirements
without them having to break out adata sheet and manually modify code.

(10:15):
Okay.
Now it is time that we touch onthe support customers will find for
adding and setting up peripherals.
So, Petr, why do customersneed the peripheral tool?
We talked about the clocks and thepins, but what complex steps is the tool
simplifying for the developer when they'retrying to capture peripheral setup?

(10:36):
NXP MCUs contain a lot of interestingperipherals, and the peripheral
tool provides a way to simplify andspeed up the configuration of them.
We provide a comprehensive SDK librarywith the drivers, but it may take
some time to get familiar with thepossibilities and that's where the
peripheral tool takes the place.
You just select the peripheral thatyou would like to use and the tool

(10:59):
automatically adds the necessaryconfiguration component into the project.
You can select the mode settings forthe peripherals and the tool generates
the initialization code with prefilleddata structures and the function
calling the appropriate SDK APIneeded for the proper initialization.
If you have a tool chain projectlinked to the configuration.

(11:21):
The tool checks if the proper SDKcomponents are in the project and
that they are in the proper version.
So Petr, this sounds like your teamhas been providing sort of an AI code
generation for customers for years.
Working with these new AI tools, it'seffectively doing what you're saying.
Which is understand the projectrequirements, look at the chip

(11:42):
resources, and then properly seteverything up for the customer.
This isn't Artificial, it's Chechen.
Love it.
Yeah.
But there is more if you have selecteda peripheral in the components.
The peripheral tool cooperates withpins and clock tools and checks the
proper configuration of pins and clocksrelated to the selected peripherals.

(12:05):
It can detect problems like unroutedpin signals or disabled clocks.
This would be quite tricky toidentify just by looking at the code.
Without it, you might notidentify those mistakes until
you actually tried in a hardware.
Okay.
So that means less late nights in thelab trying to figure out why the clock
is missing or the pin has no output.

(12:28):
What else, Petr?
Keep us going.
Yeah, the tool can also help withconfiguration of DMA transfers and
channels in case the component operatesin DMA mode, which is sometime complex
things because there are sometimescomplex relationships between
triggers and DMA channels, et cetera.
And you can see an overview of thechannels showing which component is

(12:49):
using which channels, for example.
This has all been so helpful,Petr, but now I've got to ask,
what's the latest shiny objectyour team has been working on?
Anything new or exciting on the roadmap?
We continue working on improving allconfiguration tools, but if I should name
one topic, it would be the support ofconfiguration of the Zephyr RTOS, this

(13:11):
realtime operating system is becomingmore and more popular in embedded
systems area and we like to providetools helping to easily customize
the hardware configuration in Zephyr.
There was already introduced supportin the PINs tool earlier this year.
You can select that you are creatingZephyr configuration and the PINs
tool generates the pin controldevice tree includes for you.

(13:34):
Anyway, this is still in thebeginning and we would like to
provide users more than that.
So we are now focusing on adding moreand more capabilities related to Zephyr.
That's a really big deal, and I knowZephyr's gaining a lot of traction
right now, so having our ConfigTool support is perfect timing.
Exactly.
So to recap, today, we've exploredwhat the configuration tools are.

(13:58):
Why the pins and theclock tools are essential.
How the peripheral tools saves time andheadaches, and we even got a glimpse
into the future with the Zephyr supportthat your team's putting together.
That's a lot of value packedinto this one episode.
Yes, it is.
And a big thanks to Petr forsharing his insights and for all
the work your team does to makeembedded development so smooth.

(14:22):
Thanks for having me.
It was, uh, great to be on the showand talk about my favorite tool suite.
Well, if you like this episode,don't forget to subscribe, leave a
review, and hit that notificationbell so you never miss an episode.
And until next time, keepinnovating everyone and we'll
catch you on the next EdgeVerse.
TechCast.