This topic provides board-specific information about for NXP's i.MX RT1050. For more information on how to set up the development environment, see getting started.

Board features

• MIMXRT1052DVL6B MCU featuring 600MHz ARM Cortex-M7 core, 512KB RAM
• 4.3” 480x272 RGB Touch Display
• 256-Mbit SDRAM memory
• 512-Mbit Hyper Flash
• 64-Mbit QSPI Flash
• Socket for SD card

Supported color depths

The reference port for this board supports 16bpp color depth. The board family supports 24bpp and 32bpp framebuffers, but the reference boards have only 16 lines physically connected to the LCD interface, so only 16 bpp is supported. See QUL_COLOR_DEPTH and Color depth for more information.

Prebuilt demos and examples

The package for NXP i.MX RT1050 Evaluation Kit board comes with the following prebuilt demos and examples:

• BareMetal
  • thermo
• FreeRTOS
  • thermo

You can find these from demo_images directory.

See Flashing Instructions for NXP boards section on how to flash the device.

Known issues

• The interrupted program does not resume its execution while debugging. It must be restarted using the mon reset halt command.

• CMake flash targets may not work properly for small application binaries. Use gdb to workaround this problem.

Reading debug messages

By default, the output of qul_printf and Qul::PlatformInterface::log calls are redirected to a virtual serial port, which is exposed on the host machine via USB.

Debugging

For convenience, you can set an environment variable that points to the Redlink tool, which is part of the MCUXpresso IDE.

export REDLINK=$MCUXPRESSO_IDE_PATH/ide/LinkServer/binaries/crt_emu_cm_redlink

set REDLINK=%MCUXPRESSO_IDE_PATH%\ide\LinkServer\binaries\crt_emu_cm_redlink

Where, MCUXPRESSO_IDE_PATH is an environment variable pointing to the MCUXpresso IDE installation directory.

• Open a terminal window and run the following command: LinuxWindows

  $REDLINK --server :50032 --mi -2 -vc --connect-reset core -p MIMXRT1052xxxxB --ConnectScript RT1050_connect.scp --flash-driver= -x ./platform/boards/nxp/mimxrt1050-evk-common/cmake

  %REDLINK% --server :50032 --mi -2 -vc --connect-reset core -p MIMXRT1052xxxxB --ConnectScript RT1050_connect.scp --flash-driver= -x .\platform\boards\nxp\mimxrt1050-evk-common\cmake

  GDB Server is now listening for TCP connections on port, 50032.

  Note: To change TCP port used by redlink_server, change --server :50032 to different value.

• Run arm-none-eabi-gdb in a separate console LinuxWindows

  /path/to/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb <PATH_TO>/your_app.elf

  C:\path\to\bin\arm-none-eabi-gdb.exe <PATH_TO>\your_app.elf

• Connect to the target via the gdbserver in the arm-none-eabi-gdb console using

  (gdb) target remote :50032

• Alternatively, flash the target device from the arm-none-eabi-gdb console using the following command:

  (gdb) load

RLE decompression

For performance reasons, opaque RLE images with opacity applied are decompressed into intermediate buffers of a limited size, before blending them using PXP onto the framebuffer in SDRAM.

Performance can be improved to some degree by increasing the size of qul_scratch_buffer in platform_nxp.cpp, at the cost of more RAM usage.