The EDP baseboard is designed to be used and reused with new CPU and application modules being introduced on a regular basis. Its robust design has been rigorously tested, and every effort has been made at the design stage to protect the EDP from the most common human errors: the motherboard will have a significantly longer life than the average development board and is suitable for use in specialist one-off and low-volume products.  Typical applications might be industrial controllers, scientific instrument controllers, datalogging and remote monitoring.  For these reasons the EDP will prove attractive to all design engineers looking for a cost effective solution which allows them to significantly improve their development process and thus deliver products in reduced time. Design engineers, consultants, educators and trainers will quickly realise the benefits and recognise the potential of the development platform modules system as an effective solution.

With the difficulty in applying traditional “bread-boarding” techniques to today’s tiny SMT components, evaluating new active devices has become major problem.  There is usually no alternative to creating a special “try-out” PCB using rapid PCB production houses just to get a new device up and running.  The EDP has been designed to host such experimental and trial designs, providing “clean” 5 and 3V3 supplies and instant access to a range of standard microcontrollers and IO blocks and devices.  The design information necessary to allow you to create your own module for experimenting with new devices is available free of charge but in many cases, RS will already have such a module available to save you the effort.

The EDP represents the start of a continuous launch process which will see the introduction of new processor and application modules on a monthly basis.

Command Module: ST Microelectronics STR912

Command Module: Infineon XC167

Command Module: PIC PIM 

Command Module: MBED

Application Module: Analogue Input

Application Module: Digital Input/Output

Application Module: Brushed DC Motor Control

Application Module: Basic Communications

The generic signals present on the connectors have names which indicate their primary and secondary functions.

EDPCON1 Signal Description

EDPCON2 Signal Description

A microcontroller that has its IO pins mapped appropriately onto the EDPCON1 and EDPCON2 connectors appears to be a virtual CPU to other IO devices fitted on the bus.  Thus for example, a 14-bit ADC device on the EDPCON baseboard will see a CPU module also on the bus, as a virtual CPU whose pinout is defined by the EDP bus.  Currently two popular microcontrollers (Infineon XC167 and ST STR9) have had their IO pins mapped onto the EDPCON system.  These two devices have some features in common  -UARTs, capture and compare pins, ADC, CAN but the STR9 also has USB device.  Thus the pin mapping to the EDPCON is not 100% in that on the XC167 version, the USB device pins are unused.  Both devices have dedicated motor control peripherals which although they have different pin names, have virtually the same functionality. Hence for example, a brushless DC motor control module with half-bridges can be designed to interface to the motor control region of the EDPCON bus without any regard for the CPU type to be ultimately used. The net result is that subject some limitations, a range of modules bearing different CPUs can be freely connected to a range of IO modules.

The EDPCON has been designed to accommodate all the common peripherals found on current microcontrollers, including advanced interfaces like SD/MMC and I2S.  Thus it is possible to map almost any microcontroller to this format. 

Example Of Real CPU To EDPCON Mapping

This is the mapping developed for the Infineon XC167 and used on the RS-EDPCM-XC167 module.