TI Training home SimpleLink™ Academy: Interactive training for wireless connectivity How to Leverage SimpleLink Academy
SimpleLink™ Academy: Interactive training for wireless connectivity
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How to Leverage SimpleLink Academy
[MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, everyone, today we're here to talk about SimpleLink Academy. SimpleLink has a lot of different solutions and a lot of different microcontrollers that can do a large amount of different things. And because we have a lot of different solutions, we want to be able to teach our customers how to use those solutions. SimpleLink Academy is that answer.
SimpleLink Academy allows you to walk through various product, and step-by-step, learn how to use it in a very structured and self-paced manner. My name's Evan Wakefield. I work for Low Power RF BLE software applications. Sarah Pelosi couldn't be with me today, but we're both really excited to bring this to the forefront and allow you to really get to know SimpleLink Academy and how it can benefit your development flow.
Let's get started. Today what we're going to talk about is some of the current challenges that you may have as a customer when trying to get to know various SimpleLink solutions. Where does SimpleLink Academy fit? What is SimpleLink Academy exactly? Current content offerings, and how it's organized. How do you leverage SimpleLink Academy and know where to find various things? So what are some of the challenges that you, as a customer, are going to face when you decide that you want to use a SimpleLink solution for your design?
Oftentimes, connectivity is in high demand. Let's suppose that you're working on a project and there comes a new requirement to add wireless connectivity. You're going to have to add wireless connectivity, probably without sacrificing too much time in your design window. You want to be able to learn and be able to enable that solution inside of your application in as quickly as a manner as possible.
Second, all silicon vendors really have different solutions. Customers are challenged to learn that solution quickly and implement it within their project, and they want to be invested in that solution from the get-go. They want to know that that's the solution for their project.
So we need to instill some confidence in you that we're going to help you learn our approach to, let's say, a BLE stack so you can learn all the ins and outs on how to use that BLE stack to the best of your abilities and implement that within your project. It's also really important for customers to know where to go and be guided through that learning environment, as well as learn, maybe, let's say the BLE spec, for instance, along with it. Or also, many days we're increasingly adding RTOS to some microcontroller solutions. Maybe you don't have experience with RTOS, so you also have to learn that, too. That's really, I think, something that SimpleLink Academy is trying to tackle.
So what's the starting point in SimpleLink? Oftentimes, you start with a code example. Code examples have a defined functionality, and usually are built to express a common use case. But let's be honest, sometimes they can be quite complex.
Within a BLE stack, for instance, if you're using a simple profile example, it's a large project. It's pretty complex. It has the full BLE solution within it, and it shows a simple variety of how to use that BLE solution. It also requires extensive comments, and oftentimes, that's not enough to get to know the code example.
So the next step is actually looking at users guides. This brings depth to the code examples, defines all the possibilities of functionality. But oftentimes it's not easy to consume, or if it is, it's not very easy to move forward. It really is a look back type of document that allows you to really understand what's going on within a code example, but it's not great at explaining, where are we going with this code example?
Another portion is TI designs and application notes, or white papers. Maybe you have looked at a TI design or an application note and you thought, this would be great. But oftentimes, this TI design or app note can be very end equipment focused, and it can be very advanced, well beyond general code examples. And it's great for specific applications, but maybe it's not great for your application.
So there's this gap that has been created, where oftentimes you don't know how to jump from a code example to enable your end solution. Let's say you're, again, learning a BLE solution, and you have a BLE stack and you have a BLE application. What part of that is-- the stack in the application, what part of that is the specification of Bluetooth Low Energy, or what part of that is actually TI solution to Bluetooth Low Energy, and how do you enable that solution?
Really, this is the gap that we're trying to solve with SimpleLink Academy. It helps you move forward. It starts with a code example. It establishes a clear outcome in every single lab.
And there's simplified, step-by-step instructions to educate you, the customer, on how to enable TI's solution to that problem. And oftentimes it references the users guides and points you to other documentation so you can leverage that even further down in your development experience. The idea is for this to get you from the starting point and move you towards your end application, and helps you learn both the specification and TI's approach to solving the specification on TI's MCUs.
So what is SimpleLink Academy? First, we like to think that it's pretty comprehensive. This covers all phases of development, and really, any customer can get started with it.
It's got basic fundamental labs, such as out of box, or just a Project 0, so to speak, with the Bluetooth Low Energy. Or a Wi-Fi solution or a host microcontroller solution, all the way up to advanced topics that might not be the easiest to consume or really understand if it's your first time getting to see that solution.
It's maintained, which is really great. It's updated and released every quarter with each SDK, so you can be sure that the training that you're walking through is up-to-date, relevant to your solution today. It's self-paced. This is a critical part of your customer development flow. It's great for all customers, regardless of their background and expertise. And this really allows you to take the training at your pace.
You don't have to press Play and Pause every single time you want to go sit down and really experiment with code. It walks you through the code changes. It shows you various points in the code that you can leverage to maybe make your application a little more efficient.
And it's interactive. It starts with a code example, like we said, and it establishes a clear goal. And it provides step-by-step instructions to achieve that goal while referencing the other documentation as well as quizzing you on various aspects that you're learning along the way.
What are some of TI's current content offerings for SimpleLink Academy? First, SimpleLink Wide across all of the product lines-- we have TI-Drivers, TI-RTOS, FreeRTOS, and debugging. This is important, one, because many customers may not have experience with RTOS on an MCU. They want to understand what an RTOS software architecture looks like and how to enable that in their application.
Two, maybe you have some RTOS experience, and you want to learn a little bit more about how you can improve your application. Both of these labs can do that. For TI-Drivers, this is important because it also enables you to write a 100% application portable code for, let's say, a host microcontroller, and then you can add Wi-Fi to that later. You can take the investment that you spent on writing that code for your host microcontroller and easily enable that same solution inside of your SimpleLink Wi-Fi device, or you can take that and go to SimpleLink BLE.
Second, within LPRF, which is our BLE Sub 1 and Zigbee solutions, we have a variety of different topics. BLE4.2, BLE5.0, TI-OpenThread, which is our thread solution, TI 15.4-Stack, which is our solution for Sub 1-GHz, and the Sensor Controller Studio, which is a sub-component of many of the LPRF chips. You can learn all about these within the LPRF SimpleLink Academies.
For ECS, which is our Wi-Fi group, you can learn about provisioning and secure sockets and over-the-air downloads. In MSP432, which is our Host MCU-- it's a Cortex-M4F-- you can learn about Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Sub-1GHz plugins, Precision ADC Trainings, and many, many more things. There's also, within the SimpleLink ecosystem, something called the Plugin.
Our goal is-- for every single plugin that we provide to the SimpleLink ecosystem, we want to have a SimpleLink Academy that teaches you how to utilize that plugin-- for instance, sensors. Another good thing to remember is because we update the SimpleLink Academy every quarter, there's more content every quarter. This is great for you, woo!
So how is it organized? First, you should go to dev.ti.com/tirex. You can explore a variety of different things in dev.ti.com and see a variety of different tools, like UniFlash. You can also go to tirex, which hosts each SDK for our SimpleLink solutions, as well as other solutions within TI so you can cruise through and explore various SDK components, code examples, and other things such as app notes and TI designs.
Once you pick the SDK that you want to stick with-- let's say, here in a little bit, we'll play with the CC26X2 SDK-- you can go inside of it and navigate to SimpleLink Academy. And in SimpleLink Academy, you want to start with the Overview page. Let's go check out that page right now.
Like I said, if you go to dev.ti.com, you can see a variety of different tools, including Code Composer, StudioCloud, Pinmux, GUI Composer, UniFlash, and Resource Explorer. Today we're going to dive into Resource Explorer and look and see all of the various components of Resource Explorer. We also call this tirex for short.
Within tirex, you have Device Documentation, Software, and Development Tools. Today we're looking at Software, and you can see the different SDKs for the SimpleLink solution. If we dive in one of these SDKs, we can see that each SDK includes documents, examples, SimpleLink Academy, and SimpleLink Academy that's translated into Mandarin.
Let's jump into SimpleLink Academy. Within SimpleLink Academy, you can see that there's an Overview page and a variety of different other folders. Let's start with the Overview page today.
In this Overview page, you have an Introduction. You have various packages that describes which SDK this goes with. You have a Getting Started that gives you some general guidelines of where to start. And then we have some suggested curriculum.
In the Lab Overview, you can see that we have content that's recommended for Bluetooth 5, as well as TI's OpenThread, TI 15.4, TI-RTOS, TI-Drivers, POSIX, and Sensor Controller Studio, as well as some other videos that might be useful in getting to know the device that you're currently using. Over here, you can use this navigation bar to quickly zoom up and down the page. Let's jump to BLE 5.
Within BLE 5, we have five different labs, ranging from more of a fundamentals chapter, which is a part of our Project 0, all the way down to a custom profile, which is a pretty advanced lab. Each lab is built on top of one another. So inside of scanning and advertising, there's a recommended reading section that says you should probably do the fundamentals lab first if you're new to the SLA experience or you're new to the device.
At the bottom, we also have Release Notes. So you can see what's new in each new SDK. That concludes our SimpleLink Academy tour for the day. And I hope that you found it informative and you can clearly see how SimpleLink Academy can benefit you as a customer. Thank you.
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説明
2018年 4月 4日
The video explains how to leverage SimpleLink Academy, which provides a comprehensive and interactive learning experience for the SimpleLink portfolio of devices covering all phases of development from basic examples to more advanced optimization techniques that help fine tune your design.
