Low Cost Renesas Target Boards for RX MCUs are Designed for Home Appliances, Building & Industrial Automation

Renesas Electronics has announced three new Target Boards for the RX65N, RX130 and RX231 32-bit Microcontroller (MCU) groups designed for home appliance, building and industrial automation applications.

Each board has minimal features with an on-chip debugger, a mini USB port, the micro-controller, and through-hole pin headers providing access to all MCU signals. This design allows to access all MCU features while keeping the price below $30.

Renesas Target Board specifications:

MCU
- Renesas RX65N (R5F565NEDDFP) 32-bit RXv2 MCU @ 120 MHz with 2MB+32KB ROM, 640KB RAM
- Renesas RX130 (R5F51308ADFP) 32-bit MCU @ 32 MHz with 512KB+8KB ROM, 48 KB RAM
- Renesas RX231 (R5F52318ADFP) 32-bit RXv2 MCU @ 54 MHz with 512KB+8KB ROM, 64 KB RAM
Expansion
- Unpopulated 12-pin Pmod connector
- 2x unpopulated 50-pin MCU headers
Misc
- 2-pin Current measurement header
- Reset and user push buttons
- Power LED (Green), ACT LED (Green), 2x user LEDs (Green)
- 2-pin emulator reset header
Power Supply
- 5V via mini USB port
- 3.3V via external power supply 2-pin header
- 3-pin power selection header
- Current consumption – 200mA max
Dimensions – 90.0mm x 53.34mm x 0.8 mm

The PCB looks exactly the same for all variants since Renesas RX MCUs have a common pin assignment on their 100-pin package.

The company provides device package for OS-less development, as well as support for FreeRTOS & ITRON OS real-time operating systems, and various tools and libraries to help with development including Segger emWin, file systems, TCP/IP network stack, and so on.

Documentation, software, and tools can all be found on the boards page, where you’ll also find links to purchase Target Board for RX65N / RX130 for $28.05 on Digikey. The version with RX231 does not appear to be sold just yet.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.