Texas Instruments Inc. announces its new TMS320C2000 Piccolo microcontroller (MCU) DC/DC LED Developer’s Kit to allow designers to differentiate designs with advanced features such as dimming, color tone adjustment, power line communication and fault detection.

Additionally, developers can reduce system cost through the integrated control of LED and power stages using a single Piccolo MCU. The kit is easily adaptable for varying design needs, as it supports multiple power configuration options, modular Piccolo controlCARDs and a detachable LED panel.

The DC/DC LED Developer’s Kit comes complete with all of the open source hardware and software needed to jumpstart design of energy-efficient LED electronics, including backlighting, street lighting and building automation lighting.

The Piccolo F28035 controlCARD provides 60MHz of 32-bit performance, 14 PWM outputs, a 12 bit, 4.6 megasample per second ADC, and 128KB of flash memory to support advanced lighting features.

A digitally controlled buck/boost DC/DC 12-24V power conversion stage allows developers to adjust voltage to match varying LED configurations and 8 independent 5 watt LED strings allow unique current sensing for features like individual brightness adjustment and blown string detection.

Onboard isolated XDS100 USB JTAG emulation is included to simplify debugging and programming while reducing system cost. RI’s open source Eclipse IDE-based controlSUITE software kit includes examples for closed loop control of DC/DC power and LED driver stages as well as detailed lab documentation of software structure and functionality.

The new Piccolo MCU DC/DC LED Developer’s Kit is priced at $379 and is available now, as is the free controlSUITE software, which can be immediately downloaded.