SAM4L-EK

Overview

The SAM4L series embeds picoPower technology for ultra-low power consumption. Combined power control techniques are used to bring active current consumption down to 90μA/MHz. The device allows a wide range of configurations giving the user the ability to balance between the lowest possible power consumption and the feature set selected for the application. The WAIT and RETENTION modes provide full logic and RAM retention, associated with fast wake-up capability (<1.5μs) and a very low consumption of, respectively, 3 μA and 1.5 μA. In addition, WAIT mode supports SleepWalking features. In BACKUP mode, CPU, peripherals and RAM are powered off consuming less than 0.9μA with external interrupt wake-up support.

The SAM4L-EK is a full featured design to develop for Atmel SAM4L SoC series. The kit is equipped with a rich set of peripherals that make the ATSAM4L-EK a perfect evaluation platform. Download the SAM4L-EK Online User Guide [1] for more details.

Hardware

  • ATSAM4LC4C ARM Cortex-M4 Processor

  • 12 MHz crystal oscillator

  • 32.768 kHz crystal oscillator

  • 1 Micro-AB USB OTG host/device

  • 1 AT86RF2xx IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver connector

  • 1 RS-485 full duplex interface

  • 1 Sensor Xplained board connector

  • 1 Audio Jack connector 3.5mm

  • 1 Dedicated Board Monitor MCU

    • Power measurement (VDDIN, VDDIO, VDDANA)

    • 1 OLED Display (128x64)

    • 5 LEDs

    • 1 Joystick

    • 1 USART

    • 1 TWI

  • 1 40x4 LCD Segment Display

  • 1 user touch button and One user pushbutton

  • 1 user LED

  • 1 QTouch Slider

  • 1 QTouch Button

  • 1 TEMT6000 Light Sensor

  • 1 AT25DF641A Serial NOR Flash

Supported Features

The sam4l_ek board supports the hardware features listed below.

on-chip / on-board
Feature integrated in the SoC / present on the board.
2 / 2
Number of instances that are enabled / disabled.
Click on the label to see the first instance of this feature in the board/SoC DTS files.
vnd,foo
Compatible string for the Devicetree binding matching the feature.
Click on the link to view the binding documentation.

sam4l_ek/sam4lc4c target

Type

Location

Description

Compatible

CPU

on-chip

ARM Cortex-M4 CPU1

arm,cortex-m4

Clock control

on-chip

Atmel Power Management Controller (PMC)1

atmel,sam-pmc

Counter

on-chip

Atmel SAM Timer Counter (TC) node1 1

atmel,sam-tc

Flash controller

on-chip

Atmel SAM4L Flash Controller Double Word (FLASHCALW)1

atmel,sam4l-flashcalw-controller

GPIO & Headers

on-chip

SAM4L GPIO Port3

atmel,sam4l-gpio

Hardware information

on-chip

ATMEL SAM4L Unique 120-bit Serial Number1

atmel,sam4l-uid

I2C

on-chip

Atmel SAM4L Family I2C (TWIM)1 3

atmel,sam-i2c-twim

Input

on-board

Group of GPIO-bound input keys1

gpio-keys

Interrupt controller

on-chip

ARMv7-M NVIC (Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller)1

arm,v7m-nvic

LED

on-board

Group of GPIO-controlled LEDs1

gpio-leds

MMU / MPU

on-chip

ARMv7-M Memory Protection Unit (MPU)1

arm,armv7m-mpu

MTD

on-chip

Flash node1

soc-nv-flash

Pin control

on-chip

Atmel SAM Pinctrl Container1

atmel,sam-pinctrl

RNG

on-chip

Atmel SAM RNG1

atmel,sam-trng

Serial controller

on-chip

Atmel SAM family USART1 3

atmel,sam-usart

SPI

on-chip

Atmel SAM SPI controller1

atmel,sam-spi

SRAM

on-chip

Generic on-chip SRAM description1

mmio-sram

Timer

on-chip

ARMv7-M System Tick1

arm,armv7m-systick

USB

on-chip

Atmel SAM Family USB (USBC) in device mode1

atmel,sam-usbc

Watchdog

on-chip

ATMEL SAM4L watchdog1

atmel,sam4l-watchdog

Connections and IOs

The SAM4L-EK Design Documentation [2] has detailed information about board connections. Download the SAM4L-EK Design Documentation [2] for more details.

System Clock

The SAM4L MCU is configured to use the 12 MHz internal oscillator on the board with the on-chip PLL to generate an 48 MHz system clock.

Serial Port

The ATSAM4LC4C MCU has 4 USARTs. One of the USARTs (USART2) is connected on the embedded debug unit and can works as a console. The USART0 is shared between all others headers and RS-485 port.

Programming and Debugging

The SAM4L-EK board have a Segger Embedded Debugger Unit J-Link OB. This provides a debug interface to the SAM4LC4C chip. You can use Ozone or JLink to communicate with the SAM4LC4C.

Flashing

  1. Download JLink from the Segger JLink Downloads Page [3]. Go to the section “J-Link Software and Documentation Pack” and install the “J-Link Software and Documentation pack for Linux”. The application JLinkExe needs to be accessible from your path.

  2. Run your favorite terminal program to listen for output. Under Linux the terminal should be /dev/ttyACM0. For example:

    $ minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0 -o

    The -o option tells minicom not to send the modem initialization string. Connection should be configured as follows:

    • Speed: 115200

    • Data: 8 bits

    • Parity: None

    • Stop bits: 1

  3. Connect the SAM4L-EK board to your host computer using the USB debug port. Then build and flash the Hello World application.

    # From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b sam4l_ek samples/hello_world
west flash

    You should see “Hello World! sam4l_ek” in your terminal.

Debugging

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b sam4l_ek samples/hello_world
west debug

References