How To Use The Kenetis KL25Z Freedom Board As An HID Mouse

[Eric] is interested in turning this Freedom development board into an air mouse by using the onboard accelerometer. But he had to work through the particulars of the USB HID mouse class before he could get that done.

This Freescale FRDM-KL25Z is one of the awesome ARM boards we looked at a year ago. Can you believe you can get this thing for like thirteen bucks? We suppose the gotcha is that the CodeWarrior IDE meant for use with them is not entirely free. But there is a free trial, and [Eric] shows how much easier it is to tailor the USB stack for your needs with it.

Don’t worry though. If you’re like us and use Open Source For The Win he’s got you covered as well. When you’re done reading his HID mouse writeup head on over to his six-part tutorial for building a free toolchain for the Kenetis boards.

12 thoughts on “How To Use The Kenetis KL25Z Freedom Board As An HID Mouse

    1. Nice… I made this program to use the touch slider, accelerometer, RGB LED and HID mouse on this board. The touch slider sets the brightness, the orientation of the board (gravity vector) controls the LED and mouse pointer.
      https://mbed.org/users/vsluiter/code/AccelerometerLedTsiDemo/

      I really like the mbed environment for protoyping; it’s so much tighter in documentation than Arduino. Anyone trying out the editor should enable the ‘Beta’ functions, so you can look up function definitions by pressing ‘Control’ while hovering over a function name.

    1. The problem with Mbed (and it’s the same for Arduino) is that you lose a lot of flexibility and MIPS from your board because of the huge libraries.

      Codewarrior is based on Eclipse and I think its main problem is here as all tools based on Eclipse.

      It takes times to master it but you can do so much more things with it, and last important one, you will definitely need to dig into the MCU’s User Manual, whereas you can leave it apart with Mbed or Arduino and others what I call RPT (Rapid Prototyping Tools)

      1. I agree. Although, I wouldn’t consider that really to be a ‘problem’ with mbed…more of a consideration to understand when you’re messing around, testing new ideas, or prototyping something.. It’s a worthwhile trade-off when you’re not in a serious project..for me at least.

  1. I got one of these boards as a freebie from Freescale when I went to one of their seminars at a local tech fair. Great little board, and capable of programming offboard chips as well, which is always nice. I quite like the KL2 platform, and with prices starting at around $3 in onesies, it outprices MSP430 (my prior favorite) in many applications.

    I guess I do have to be the spelling nazi this time though, since nobody else has yet… it’s KINETIS, not kenetis.

  2. I will wait till it’s PNP, but I can’t wait I want the next gestural interface for live music!
    Of course these cannot be used by aliens or robots! This is discriminating.

  3. “Kenetis”? On multiple occasions? Excuse my asking, but will, with the new management, also come writers who actually give a fuck of what they write about? At least to the extent of getting the subject name right? Maybe just once in an article?

    Outrageous grammar and spelling being HaD signatures are funny only for so long.

    1. I dont understand, Mike Szczys has been writing here since 2009. I have yet to witness the hand of the new overlords other than the “We’re your new overlords” post about a week back, not much has changed, me likey the mikeys posts.

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