TI ARM Board $4.99 -- Promo Price, Not A Cruel Joke

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starhawk

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This one is for electronics and robotics hobbyists (if you have an Arduino you're definitely in this group).

Texas Instruments has their Stellaris LaunchPad (ARM Cortex M4 eval board) on preorder for $4.99 -- including shipping!

Some info here [overzealous office monitoring software may not approve this link!] --> http://hackaday.com/2012/08/31/preorder-tis-arm-cortex-m4-launchpad-for-5-delivered/

Some more at TI's site, here --> https://estore.ti.com/Stellaris-LaunchPad.aspx

That second link is where you order ;) they take Magic Plastic (Credit or Debit), Paypal, or something that looks like it's to do with Alibaba that I reeeeeally don't trust.

TI says it ships starting on 25 Sept... they must have a backlog cuz it says at the bottom to allow two to four weeks for it to get to ya. Well worth it for the savings, IMO.
 
Build stuff. All sorts of stuff. This thing is about five times the speed of an Arduino Leonardo (80MHz vs 16MHz) and it's 32bit instead of 8bit (!) so you can do a whole shitload of stuff with it. Build a low-power eReader. Hell, build a robot and take over the world (or at least your house)!

...BTW, the Hubble Space Telescope runs (or ran at one time) on a 386 ;) think about what *that* can do, vs what ARM CPUs can do now...

I'm thinking (well outside my current abilities, as usual) that I'm going to make a little PC and a homebrew OS with this thing. Mind you I've never held an Arduino and my last programming session was in an outdated BASIC editor originally found on a PC /with/ a 386 :eek:

EDIT: it's basically a "low-power" microprocessor being used as a microcontroller. Meaning that it beats the ever-loving SHIT out of a "regular microcontroller" like a PIC or an AVR. (Arduino runs on AVR.)

Speaking of AVR and ARM --> http://hackaday.com/2012/03/28/building-the-worst-linux-pc-ever/
...if you can do THAT with an 8bit 24MHz microcontroller, imagine what you can do with a 32bit 80MHz much-more-capable microprocessor!
 
Not much difference between a microcontroller and a microprocessor IMO, except for two things... power and availability of GPIOs. Microcontroller has more GPIOs, less power. Microprocessor is the opposite.

In short... doesn't matter that much -- low power MPU ≃ high power MCU.

EDIT: and your example has an 8bit chip. The TI board has a 32bit chip. I think I'd rather have the TI board ;)
 
Too bad I have no idea where to begin or how to do anything with it.

Is there one that can be used for a mouse?
 
They're nice and cheap, but they are for commercial development use only. They ask for company information as part of user registration and when placing the order.
 
I'm not a company. I entered "Hobbyist" and "none" in those fields and they don't seem to have a problem with it.

EDIT: probably not going to dev my own os -- that would be a real mess. I think I'll just dev a really lightweight linux for it. Mebbe use the debian arm port and strip things down to basics. Not sure yet.
 
starhawk said:
I'm not a company. I entered "Hobbyist" and "none" in those fields and they don't seem to have a problem with it.

EDIT: probably not going to dev my own os -- that would be a real mess. I think I'll just dev a really lightweight linux for it. Mebbe use the debian arm port and strip things down to basics. Not sure yet.
Click to expand...

uClinux
 
Possibly Bodhi. Puppy, as much as I love it, only works ARM on the RasPi, and only then if you're sufficiently religous. Not gonna mess with rebuilding that -- I'd have to basically start from x86 code and re-port it over. No thanks!

I've sent an email to Bodhi's creator, see if I can get that to run on this. Debian's a bit big for that little chip, anyways.

Speaking of "that chip", it has eight serial lines -- four I2C and four SPI. Those are extraordinarily common to the point of being standard interfaces for memory chips and such. I'll be using at least two SPI lines, depending on how the chip implements that. If it's four separate SPI ports (each with four wires) then I'll be using three of them and some denser RAM chips. If I can get extra SS (chip select) lines on one port, then I'll only need two ports.

One or two SPI ports will go to the RAM, depending on config (as mentioned immediately above) -- I'll be using either four 32mb or two 64mb SPI SRAM chips. SRAM is a little expensive compared to DRAM --or so I've heard-- but it's worth it. DRAM needs a refresh every so often, and I don't want to waste clock cycles on that if I can avoid it. Besides, the 32mb chips are $2 each! (Even I can afford *that*....) A third SPI port will run an SD card with the OS and user data on it.

Not sure what I'll do with the I2C ports. Maybe that's what'll run whatever video solution I come up with... I've also got a crapton of GPIOs to play with, so I might be able to bit-bang some stuff, although I'd rather not if I don't have to. Bit-banging is /really/ clumsy.

EDIT: to clarify: bit banging is rather clumsy at the level of what I'm doing. For an Arduino or somesuch, it works out just fine. For this... it's like trying to run an automotive control computer on Windows ME. (I'm ignoring the issue of severe intractable processor incompatibility here.) Sooner or later, it's gonna crash, and it's gonna crash BAD. I don't think I like that kind of behavior!

Also, uCLinux looks like it's intended for something like a higher-end AVR microcontroller. The TI chip in question blows that sort of thing (16MHz, 8bit, etc., etc.) clear out of the water.

EDIT2: got the video sorted out. TI didn't see fit to stick a GPU of *any* kind on that microcontroller of theirs... bit of a problem for me, but I'll deal with it. My solution is a bit unconventional (by which I mean it uses obsolete standards and some hard-to-find equipment) but it will work. I'll be using a TinyVGA setup, either homebuilt, or using a PCB if I can get one from them from a less-than-obscene price. (Their website does not seem to allow you to order that particular device... so I may be building it on perfboard!)
 
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I've got a friend studying engineering and he's got to do a capstone project. Maybe I'll get him this as a gift, and he can use it to build a robot of some sort. What language would one use to program this, and would it be simple to program from a Windows or Linux box?
 
Considering it's got a USB port, you should be able to program it from nearly anything that also has a USB port and an OS.

You can program in a lot of different languages with this, but it'll end up as ARM assembly code (hexadecimal-represented-binary) no matter what -- that's what "compiling" is ;)

Go for it, man. This thing *has to* blow an Arduino out of the water, processing power-wise, and it's 1/6 the price! (1/5 if you're looking at the Leonardo revision rather than the Uno revision ;) )
 
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