Integrating an mDot into a custom board

[Heath Raftery]

I’m in the process of designing a custom board with an mDot as the brains. Is there any advice on how to retain the programming and debugging functionality of the micro developer kit, while the board is in-situ?

I’d like to retain the ability to program and debug Mbed from Eclipse, but use my custom board for power and interfacing to external sensors.

As first I thought my custom board would accept the two 10 pin headers for power and GPIO, and I would run a custom cable from the 8 pin header back to the micro developer kit for programming and debug. But now I see from the micro developer kit schematics that several of the pins in the two 10 pin headers are also used by the board: DOUT, DIN, DTR_XBEE, RSSI, MDOT_DM, MDOT_DP, RTS_XBEE and CTS_XBEE.

Maybe my best option during program/debug is to leave the mDot in the MDK, and just run my extra signals to the custom board. It means during program/debug the mDot is powered by the MDK, not my custom board, but at least that way there’s little disruption to the MDK functionality.

For final test I would have to program the mDot, then unplug it from the MDK, plug it into my custom board, and then test without a debugger. Not ideal, but could work. I’d prefer not to duplicate the MDK’s functionality on my custom board.

Any better suggestions?

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