I am monitoring the LPC2xxx Yahoo group through gmane.
There are Philips people and leading third-party vendors
there. Looks like Olimex offers quite some cheap
development tools (JTAG and demo boards). It seems to
me US$100-200 will be enough to get started (a JTAG
debugger + a demo board). There are no DIP packages
though.

As for the development tools, IAR offer 32k free kickstart
version of C-compiler. Keil offers GCC based tools as well. 
GNU-ARM tool sets are free and open source. FreeRTOS and
uC-OS II support are there as well. To Run uClinux, one
needs to have higher-end ARMs and some external RAM/Flash.

I have not started to learn ARM yet but I think I will go
there some time later and perhaps along with dsPICs.

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 9:05 AM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [EE] Low end LPC210x from US$1.47?!

ARMs certainly look attractive... anybody have any pointers on 
a good way to get started learning them? Packaging isn't too 
hobbiest friendly...Any good groups or sites to monitor? 
Low cost development tools?

Aaron

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