RCM3000 Emulation

The SAMD20 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller can be used to emulate systems previously designed for the RabbitCore RCM3000 Module by making some adjustments to the code base written in Dynamic C.

Some challenges in porting the code include:

• Replacement of Costatements with FreeRTOS methods.
• Abstracting hardware interfaces to UART and SPI ports.
• Refactoring Flash and RAM memory model to use external FRAM.
• Implementing battery back RTC clock.

The emulated system offers a number of advantages including:

• Easy upgrade to more powerful microcontrollers in the Microchip ARM family.
• Integration of Bluetooth and Wifi through external modules.
• Protection from end of life issues for the RCM3000 series of microprocessors.
• Potential for bootloader functionality for firmware upgrade over the air.
• Low power capability.

Given the supply issues with the SAMD range of microcontrollers, the code base has been rewritten for the Raspberry PI RP2040 microcontroller.

The RP2040 features:

• 133MHz Dual core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor
• 264KB of on-chip SRAM - far more RAM than typical microcontrollers
• Programmable I/O state machines
• Natively runs two tasks for parallel processing
• Supports FreeRTOS
• Programs through USB port - no need for specialized hardware