FRDM

FRDM stands for Freescale Freedom Development Platform. It is a family of low-cost development boards designed to enable rapid prototyping of applications based on Freescale's (now NXP) ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. Introduced in the early 2010s, the FRDM line targeted engineers, educators, and hobbyists seeking a standardized, turnkey platform for evaluating the Kinetis MCU family and prototyping embedded software.

Most FRDM boards combine a Cortex-M MCU with flash and RAM, a USB interface, power regulation, and an on-board debug/programming bridge (OpenSDA). They typically provide expansion connectors and, in some models, onboard sensors and interfaces to support a wide range of experiments and demonstrations. The boards are designed to be used with a variety of development environments, including ARM GCC-based toolchains, Keil, IAR, and, in earlier years, the online mbed platform; later, NXP promoted MCUXpresso as the primary IDE.

Software ecosystem: Many FRDM boards were marketed as mbed-enabled, enabling online code editing and cloud compilation, and were subsequently supported by NXP's MCUXpresso IDE and related SDKs for offline development. Community resources, tutorials, and example projects contributed to their popularity in education and entry-level product development.

Legacy and status: With Freescale's acquisition by NXP in 2015, the FRDM brand remained a recognizable line of development kits used for hands-on learning and rapid hardware/software co-design. While newer NXP platforms have emerged, FRDM boards continue to be cited in historical and educational contexts as a stepping stone into ARM Cortex-M development.