From Dev Board to Bench Tool: Using a FRDM board & Zephyr Shell for Zero Code CAN/I2C Utilities

This session is a fast, practical “pseudo demo” that shows how an FRDM-MCXA156 board running Zephyr can double as a lightweight engineering tool, not just a target for application development. Instead of walking through setup, we jump straight to the knobs that matter: enabling Zephyr’s shell and selecting drivers in Kconfig to bring up interfaces like CAN or I2C with little to no application code. With a minimal sample app that turns on the CAN shell or I2C shell, the FRDM board becomes a low cost, flexible USB to CAN or USB to I2C adapter you can keep on your bench and extend in the same way to USB to GPIO and other quick utilities. Along the way, we highlight why this approach works well for rapid bring up and debugging: the Zephyr shell commands are well documented, easy to script and provide immediate visibility into bus traffic and device interactions. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns for turning a dev board into a reusable test tool using Zephyr configuration as the primary “code” they write.