TD1208/TD1508
TD1508 is the FCC version of the TD1208, they are pin to pin compatible and based on the same SDK so converting an object working on a TD1208 sounds easy. Practically speaking there are some preparing steps because of some tiny bugs to solve.
Let see how to port a Telecom Design existing firmware for TD1208 to TD1508 (from ETSI to FCC).
After making my kit on my own, I finally got the official Telecom Design TD1204 kit (thank you TD) There is no big issues to use it once you have the right entry point, but as I had some email exchange with support to be fully ready for using it, I’m prefer to share some words with you on what to do and how it works.
Basically, the TD kit is an EFM32 Tiny Gecko Starter kit (STK3300) with some little modifications. The EFM kit have two interesting functions : in own a Jlink JTAG/SWD programming and debugging interface and its EFM32 MCU can be use to monitor power consumption with precision.
TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS
New version of the Telecom design SDK has been released for TD1208 / TD1208R / TD1204 and now officially supporting TD1205.
This new version provide some bug fixes, like a crash after 21285 transmissions that could be after 212 days in case of full use… some I had in touch with could be interested… @pioupiou and also a bug that disable gpio interrupt after sigfox transmission (I experimented it !)
For the main evolution, this version is supporting FCC and TD1508 and improving sigfox transmissions.
From my experience, this version is also a good way to decrease the size of your binary files.
This post is about upgrading from a SDK 5 to SDK6 and the impact you can when recompiling your projects.
To install the SDK from scratch, just follow the well documented official post here.
For flashing a TD1204 / TD1208 over J-link you need to use the following commands:
JLinkExe -device EFM32G210F128 -if swd -speed 1000 J-Link> loadbin xxxxx.bin,0 ... J-Link> r # reset J-Link> g # go
Total programming time is about 5 seconds. The circuit between the segger connector and the TD is the following one. (do not forget to connect VDD circuit to Segger VTref.
td1204 / j-link cable
The Telecom Design SDK contains a function to encode GPS coordinates : TD_SENSOR_EncodePositionXY this function from the SDK allow to choose the size of the GPS encoded data and to reduce it. This post explains how this function works and gives a php implementation to decode it.
Telecom Design TD1204 have really limited number of GPIOs available even if it have many pins 🙁 … So you quickly have to use the DB2-DB3 pin that are usually used by SWD port.
If you try to reconfigure directly the Pin, this will not work until you inactivate SWD. For this, you must call first the following functions :
GPIO_DbgSWDIOEnable(false); GPIO_DbgSWDClkEnable(false);
…
A good way to expand Telecom Design system is to use I2C to connect external devices. As an example I had to add an extra Analog to Digital converter. I’m using a MCP3021Ax device. This I2C chip just return a 10bits value each time you send a READ at the expected address. This post contains the TD1204 code to configure I2C and get the data back
TD1204 / Sigfox & GPS
Telecom Design provides 4 different chips to support SigFox communications. This post details the differences of each of them in term of functionnalities
All are modules are based on a EFM32 / Cortex M3 micro-controler with 128KB flash, 16KB RAM, ultra low power including a Silicon Labs transceiver. The chip is a EFM32G210F128
Read more for details