A Towering MechBot

May 24, 2011

Freescale highlights its Tower prototype boards with MechBot, a Coldfire-based robot with a built-in 3-axis accelerometer.

William G. Wong

1 of Enlarge image

Freescale MechBot

TWR-MECH board

Freescale's MechBot (Fig. 1) is built around the Coldfire-based TWR-MECH: Tower System Mechatronics Board. The TWR-MECH board (Fig. 2) includes a 32-bit MCF52259 microcontroller with 64 Kbytse RAM and 512 Kbytes of flash. The robot kit is designed to provide an easy to use development environment for experimenting with robotics. It supports the Robot Vision Toolkit and the RobotSee programming language that is supposed to be "as simple as BASIC with the power of C."

The platform can also be programmed using Freescale's Eclipse-based CodeWarrior Development Studio. The TWR-MECH board is used as a standalone module with the MechBot but it is also compatible with the Tower prototype architecture from Freescale. This allows the board to be used in a stack like those available from C-Link Systems (see Towering Robots).

The robot uses four PWM controlled servos to drive its metal legs. The board can support four more PWM outputs. A capacitive touch sensing system is arrayed around the top of the robot. There are 7 status LEDs. The micro also supports I²C, SPI, UART, GPIO and has an 8-channel, 12-bit ADC. The 12-channel sensor is controlled by the micro and an MPR121 capacitive touch sensor. The board also has a MMA7455L 3-axis accelerometer. Optional plug in sensor daughter boards can add support for touch, accelerometer, magnetometer, and pressure sensors.

Hardware debugging support utilizes the integrated open-source BDM (8-bit 9S08JM60 USB enabled microcontroller). This is supported by CodeWarrior and the other software development tools.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.