EFM32 Giant Gecko 11 (SLSTK3701A)

Overview

The EFM32 Giant Gecko Starter Kit SLSTK3701A contains an MCU from the EFM32GG Series 1 family built on an ARM® Cortex®-M4F processor with excellent low power capabilities.

Hardware

  • Advanced Energy Monitoring provides real-time information about the energy consumption of an application or prototype design.

  • Ultra low power 128x128 pixel color Memory-LCD

  • 2 user buttons, 2 LEDs and a touch slider

  • Relative humidity, magnetic Hall Effect and inductive-capacitive metal sensor

  • USB interface for Host/Device/OTG

  • 32 Mb Quad-SPI Flash memory

  • SD card slot

  • RJ-45 Ethernet jack

  • 2 digital microphones

  • On-board Segger J-Link USB debugger

For more information about the EFM32GG11 SoC and SLSTK3701A board:

Supported Features

The slstk3701a board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

MPU

on-chip

memory protection unit

COUNTER

on-chip

rtcc

ETHERNET

on-chip

ethernet

FLASH

on-chip

flash memory

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

I2C

on-chip

i2c port-polling

NVIC

on-chip

nested vector interrupt controller

SYSTICK

on-chip

systick

UART

on-chip

serial port-polling; serial port-interrupt

The default configuration can be found in boards/silabs/starter_kits/slstk3701a/slstk3701a_defconfig

Other hardware features are currently not supported by the port.

Connections and IOs

The EFM32GG11 SoC has nine GPIO controllers (PORTA to PORTI), all of which are currently enabled for the SLSTK3701A board.

In the following table, the column Name contains pin names. For example, PE1 means pin number 1 on PORTE, as used in the board’s datasheets and manuals.

Name

Function

Usage

PH10

GPIO

LED0 red

PH11

GPIO

LED0 green

PH12

GPIO

LED0 blue

PH13

GPIO

LED1 red

PH14

GPIO

LED1 green

PH15

GPIO

LED1 blue

PC8

GPIO

Push Button PB0

PC9

GPIO

Push Button PB1

PE1

GPIO

Board Controller Enable EFM_BC_EN

PH4

UART_TX

UART TX Console VCOM_TX US0_TX #4

PH5

UART_RX

UART RX Console VCOM_RX US0_RX #4

PI4

I2C_SDA

SENSOR_I2C_SDA I2C2_SDA #7

PI5

I2C_SCL

SENSOR_I2C_SCL I2C2_SCL #7

System Clock

The EFM32GG11 SoC is configured to use the 50 MHz external oscillator on the board.

Serial Port

The EFM32GG11 SoC has six USARTs, two UARTs and two Low Energy UARTs (LEUART). USART4 is connected to the board controller and is used for the console.

Programming and Debugging

Note

Before using the kit the first time, you should update the J-Link firmware from J-Link-Downloads

Flashing

The SLSTK3701A includes an J-Link serial and debug adaptor built into the board. The adaptor provides:

  • A USB connection to the host computer, which exposes a mass storage device and a USB serial port.

  • A serial flash device, which implements the USB flash disk file storage.

  • A physical UART connection which is relayed over interface USB serial port.

Flashing an application to SLSTK3701A

The sample application Hello World is used for this example. Build the Zephyr kernel and application:

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b slstk3701a samples/hello_world

Connect the SLSTK3701A to your host computer using the USB port and you should see a USB connection which exposes a mass storage device(STK3701A) and a USB Serial Port. Copy the generated zephyr.bin to the STK3701A drive.

Open a serial terminal (minicom, putty, etc.) with the following settings:

  • Speed: 115200

  • Data: 8 bits

  • Parity: None

  • Stop bits: 1

Reset the board and you’ll see the following message on the corresponding serial port terminal session:

Hello World! slstk3701a