RX261 Evaluation Kit (EK-RX261).

The following article explains all necessary steps to create an Embedded Wizard UI application suitable for the RX261 Evaluation Kit from Renesas.

Please follow these instructions carefully and step by step in order to ensure that you will get everything up and running on your target. In case you are not familiar with Embedded Wizard, please read first the chapter basic concepts and the Quick Tour tutorial to understand the principles of Embedded Wizard and the GUI development workflow.

The RX261 Evaluation Kit (EK-RX261) can be combined with an external display controller via SPI/DMA interface, which contains its own display memory. As a result, the entire framebuffer can be located inside the display controller and only a small scratch-pad buffer is needed inside the micro-controller (MCU). For this purpose, Embedded Wizard supports a partial display update, that makes it possible to update the display in sequential small areas. This makes it possible to operate with a scratch-pad buffer of a few kilobytes instead of a full-screen framebuffer within the memory space of the MCU.

Please note: The partial display update is intended to be used for extremely memory-constrained systems. Due to the fact that the display update is done in subsequent updates of small areas, moving graphical objects can cause some tearing effects. The UI design should consider this aspect.

First, make sure you have all of the following items:

The provided Embedded Wizard Build Environment for RX261 Evaluation Kit contains everything you need to create, compile, link and flash an Embedded Wizard UI application for the Renesas RX261 target. After unpacking, you will find the following subdirectories and files:

For the first bring up of your system, we recommend to use the example 'HelloWorld':

Example 'HelloWorld' within Embedded Wizard Studio.

The following steps are necessary to generate the source code of this sample application:

The following steps are necessary to build and execute the Embedded Wizard UI sample application using the Renesas e2 Studio toolchain:

If everything works as expected, the application should be executed on to the Renesas RX261 target.

Example 'HelloWorld' running on RX261 Evaluation Kit.

All other examples can be created in the same way:

After the Embedded Wizard code generation the installed post process will adapt the .cproject XML file. All necessary libraries and include paths (depending on the color format and screen rotation) will be set automatically.

In order to create your own UI project suitable for the Renesas RX261 target, you can create a new project and select the RX261 Evaluation Kit project template:

As a result you get a new Embedded Wizard project, that contains the necessary Profile attributes suitable for the RX261 Evaluation Kit board:

The following profile settings are important for your target:

Now you can use the template project in the same manner as it was used for the provided examples to compile, link and flash the binary.

After generating code, please follow the above steps, in order to compile and download your own UI application.

Most of the project settings are taken directly out of the generated code, like the color format or the screen orientation. All other settings can be made directly within the file ewconfig.h, which contains general configuration settings for the target system.

In order to receive error messages or to display simple debug or trace messages from your Embedded Wizard UI application, a serial terminal like 'Putty' or 'TeraTerm' should be used.

During a successful application startup, the console displays the following information:

This terminal connection can be used for all trace statements from your Embedded Wizard UI applications or for all debug messages from your C code.

In order to bring-up an Embedded Wizard generated UI application on your Renesas RX261 custom hardware, you can use the provided Embedded Wizard Build Environment for RX261 Evaluation Kit as a template. For general information about porting Embedded Wizard to custom hardware, please refer to the article Custom Hardware Integration.

For RX261 Evaluation Kit-based custom hardware, the following target-specific adaptations are typically necessary:

The following section contains the version history of the Build Environment (including Graphics Engine and Runtime Environment) for RX261 Evaluation Kit. These release notes describe only the platform specific aspects - for all general improvements and enhancements please see the Embedded Wizard release notes.