Renesas R-Car Spider

Overview

R-Car S4 enables the launch of Car Server/CoGW with high performance, high-speed networking,
high security and high functional safety levels that are required as E/E architectures
evolve into domains and zones.
The R-Car S4 solution allows designers to re-use up to 88 percent of software code developed
for 3rd generation R-Car SoCs and RH850 MCU applications.
The software package supports the real-time cores with various drivers and basic software
such as Linux BSP and hypervisors.

The Renesas R-Car Spider board is the Renesas R-Car S4 reference board and is designed for evaluating features and performance of this SoC.

R-Car S4 Spider

More information about the board can be found at Renesas R-Car S4 Spider website.

Hardware

Hardware capabilities for the S4 Spider board can be found on the eLinux S4 Spider page.

R-Car S4 Spider block diagram

Note

We support Zephyr running on the CR52 processor that is provided for RTOS purpose.

More information about the SoC that equips the board can be found here:

Supported Features

Here are the current supported features when running Zephyr Project on the R-Car S4 Spider CR52:

Interface

Driver/components

Support level

PINMUX

pinmux

CLOCK

clock_control

GPIO

gpio

UART

uart

FT232RQ

serial port-polling

serial port-interrupt

I2C

i2c

interrupt driven

PWM

pwm

All channels

It is also currently possible to write on the ram console.

More features will be supported soon.

Connections and IOs

The “Spider board” consists of a CPU board and a Breakout board.
The CPU board is stuck on top of the Breakout board.

Here are the official IOs figures from eLinux for S4 board:

S4 Spider CPU board IOs

S4 Spider breakout board IOs

GPIO

By running Zephyr on S4 Spider, the software controllable LED ‘LED8’ can be used as output.

UART

Here is information about both serial ports provided on the S4 Spider board :

Physical Interface

Location

Software Interface

Converter

Further Information

CN20 USB Port

CPU Board

SCIF0/HSCIF1

FT232HQ

Default Zephyr serial

CN21 USB Port

CPU Board

SCIF3/HSCIF0

FT2232H-56Q

Used by U-BOOT & Linux

Note

The Zephyr console output is assigned to SCIF0 (CN20 USB Port) with settings: 115200 8N1 without hardware flow control by default.

I2C

I2C is mainly used to manage and power-on some onboard chips on the S4 Spider board.

Embedded I2C devices and I/O expanders are not yet supported. The current I2C support therefore does not make any devices available to the user at this time.

Programming and Debugging

Build and flash applications as usual (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

Supported Debug Probe

The “Olimex ARM-USB-OCD-H” probe is the only officially supported probe.
This probe is supported by OpenOCD that is shipped with the Zephyr SDK.

The “Olimex ARM-USB-OCD-H” probe needs to be connected with a “Coresight 20 pins” adapter to CN1 connector on Spider board.

Configuring a Console

Connect a USB cable from your PC to CN20 USB port of your Spider board.

Use the following settings with your serial terminal of choice (minicom, putty, etc.):

  • Speed: 115200

  • Data: 8 bits

  • Parity: None

  • Stop bits: 1

Flashing

First of all, open your serial terminal.

Applications for the rcar_spider_s4/r8a779f0/r52 board configuration can be built in the usual way (see Building an Application for more details).

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b rcar_spider_s4/r8a779f0/r52 samples/hello_world
west flash

You should see the following message in the terminal:

*** Booting Zephyr OS build v3.3.0-rc2 ***
Hello World! rcar_spider_s4

Debugging

First of all, open your serial terminal.

Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b rcar_spider_s4/r8a779f0/r52 samples/hello_world
west debug

You will then get access to a GDB session for debugging.

By continuing the app, you should see the following message in the terminal:

*** Booting Zephyr OS build v3.3.0-rc2 ***
Hello World! rcar_spider_s4

References