Mongoose Embedded Networking Library on NXP Kinetis

Introduction

I’ll show you how to use Mongoose, the most popular open-source embedded web server and networking library (see our GitHub page), with NXP Kinetis K-series MCUs.

The K series MCUs come with built-in Ethernet MAC. This is what we will focus on. I will assume that you have a FRDM-K64F development board and have already been working with it or at least followed the Getting Started tutorial (have your Kinetis Design Studio installed, downloaded the SDK, etc).

Steps

• Download Mongoose source code from here.

• In the Mongoose source directory, navigate to the examples/NXP_K64 and copy the Kinetis SDK there. Make sure you copy the whole thing, the entire SDK_2.0_FRDM-K64F folder there (alternatively, you can manually adjust the SDK_PATH variable after you import the example project).

• Open Kinetis Design Studio

• Go to File -> Import…

• Choose Project of Projects -> Existing Project Sets

• On the next screen, click Browse…, navigate to the examples/NXP_K64/kds directory and select the Mongoose_FRDMK64F_BM.wsd file.

• Click Finish.

• Build the project. You may see a couple warnings.

• Connect a terminal to the console port (see step 2.3 in the "Getting Started" tutorial).

• Connect the Ethernet cable. By default, the example is configured to use DHCP to obtain the IP address. If you’d like to configure a static IP address, set USE_DHCP to 0 at the top of source/main.c, adjust STATIC_IP settings below and rebuild.

• Run the project. You should see the following output:

Waiting for link…
Waiting for DHCP…
  DHCP state: 6
  DHCP state: 10
DHCP bound.
Setting up HTTP server…
Server address: http://192.168.1.198/

• This should be accompanied by the on-board LED changing from red to amber to green.

• Use your browser to navigate to the given URL. You should see a simple greeting page, created by the MG_EV_HTTP_REQUEST handler and the corresponding messages on the console:

0x20000878: Connection from 192.168.1.15:38548
0x20000708: GET /
0x20000708: Connection closed 

• Congratulations, you now have a fully functioning web server on your board! But Mongoose is much more than a web server - it can act as an HTTP client, MQTT client or broker and much more. Read more about it here.