CC3200 LaunchXL

Overview

The SimpleLink CC3200 LaunchXL is a development board for the CC3200 wireless microcontroller (MCU), the industry’s first single-chip programmable MCU with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity.

Features:

  • SimpleLink Wi-Fi, internet-on-a-chip solution with integrated MCU
  • 40-pin LaunchPad standard that leverages the BoosterPack ecosystem
  • FTDI based JTAG emulation with serial port for Flash programming
  • On-board accelerometer and temperature sensor
  • Two buttons and three LEDs for user interaction
  • UART through USB to PC
  • Power from USB for the LaunchPad and optional external BoosterPack
  • GNU Debugger (GDB) support over Open On chip debugger (OpenOCD)

Details on the CC3200 LaunchXL development board can be found in the CC3200 LaunchXL User’s Guide.

Hardware

The CC3200 SoC has two MCUs:

  1. Applications MCU - an ARM® Cortex®-M4 Core at 80 MHz, with 256Kb RAM, and access to external serial 1Mb flash with bootloader and peripheral drivers in ROM.
  2. Network Coprocessor (NWP) - a dedicated ARM MCU, which completely offloads Wi-Fi and internet protocols from the application MCU.

Complete details of the CC3200 SoC can be found in the CC3200 TRM.

Supported Features

Zephyr has been ported to the Applications MCU, with basic peripheral driver support.

Interface Controller Driver/Component
UART on-chip serial port-interrupt
GPIO on-chip gpio

The accelerometer, temperature sensors, WiFi, or other perhipherals accessible through the BoosterPack, are not currently supported by this Zephyr port.

Connections and IOs

Peripherals on the CC3200 LaunchXL are mapped to the following pins in the file boards/arm/cc3200_launchxl/pinmux.c.

Function PIN GPIO
UART0_TX 55 N/A
UART0_RX 57 N/A
LED D7 (R) 64 9
LED D6 (O) 01 10
LED D5 (G) 02 11
Switch SW2 15 22
Switch SW3 04 13

The default configuration can be found in the Kconfig file at boards/arm/cc3200_launchxl/cc3200_launchxl_defconfig.

Programming and Debugging

Build

Follow the Getting Started Guide instructions for Zephyr application development.

To build for the CC3200 LaunchXL:

% make BOARD=cc3200_launchxl

This will produce both a zephyr.elf (for GDB debugging) and a zephyr.bin file (for flashing) in the outdir/cc3200_launchxl/ subdirectory.

FTDI USB Setup

The CC3200 LaunchXL has onboard FTDI based JTAG emulation with serial port for Flash programming.

Under Linux, plugging the CC3200 USB cable into the PC should result in a new USB device showing up at /dev/ttyUSB1. If not, it may be necessary to create a udev rule to load the FTDI Linux driver for the TI vendor and product ID. For example:

% cat /etc/udev/rules.d/98-usbftdi.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0451", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c32a", MODE="0660", GROUP="dialout", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe ftdi-sio" RUN+="/bin/sh -c '/bin/echo 0451 c32a > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/ftdi_sio/new_id'"

To ensure access to the usb ftdi device without having to be root, add yourself to the dialout group:

% sudo usermod -a -G dialout <username>

Once the USB cable is connected to your host PC running Linux, one should see something like:

% dmesg -t
usb 1-2: new full-speed USB device number 32 using ohci-pci
usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0451, idProduct=c32a
usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-2: Product: USB <-> JTAG/SWD
usb 1-2: Manufacturer: FTDI
usb 1-2: SerialNumber: cc3101
ftdi_sio 1-2:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
usb 1-2: Detected FT2232C
usb 1-2: Number of endpoints 2
usb 1-2: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64
usb 1-2: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64
usb 1-2: Setting MaxPacketSize 64
usb 1-2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
ftdi_sio 1-2:1.1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
usb 1-2: Detected FT2232C
usb 1-2: Number of endpoints 2
usb 1-2: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64
usb 1-2: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64
usb 1-2: Setting MaxPacketSize 64
usb 1-2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB1
ftdi_sio ttyUSB0: failed to get modem status: -110

% ls -l /dev/ttyUSB1
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout  /dev/ttyUSB1

Note

The ttyUSB1 device is used for UART0 output. ttyUSB0 is not used.

Flashing

The CC3200 has no integrated internal flash, but has 1Mb external serial flash for storing program images and other files. Upon reset, the TI bootloader copies the program from serial flash into RAM, and then transfers control to the program.

The CC3200 Programmer’s Guide provides instructions for development using the CC3200 SDK with Windows platforms, including how to flash the zephyr.bin binary onto the board.

For Windows:

See Section 5.4 of the CC3200 Programmer’s Guide; or, follow the directions per the UniFlash Quick Start Guide. Please be sure to use UniFlash version 3.4.1.

For Linux:

An option for flashing the CC3200 LaunchXL on Linux is the cc3200tool. See the README there for build/install/usage.

The following command has been known to work:

% cc3200tool -p /dev/ttyUSB1 --reset prompt write_file zephyr.bin
/sys/mcuimg.bin

Note

You will need to manually insert a jumper on SOP2 (J15) for flashing and remove the jumper for execution.

Debugging

The CC3200 SDK supports debugging using GDB (for ARM) over OpenOCD, and includes the necessary OpenOCD CFG and sample gdbinit scripts.

See Section 5.3.3.5 of the CC3200 Programmer’s Guide.

To see program output from UART0, one can execute in a separate terminal window:

% screen /dev/ttyUSB1 115200 8N1

Note

The bootloader takes the first 16Kb of the 256Kb RAM, so the Zephyr application starts at 0x20004000. The Zephyr CC3200 configuration thus sets the max SRAM size to 240Kb.