On 5/20/06, William Chops Westfield <westfw@mac.com> wrote:

> >
> With a $700+ development board for their $1 micro, they're
> making even Freescale/motorola look good...  That seems to
> be a generic problem with the "cheap" ARMs.  Your cheap
> chip rapidly becomes a $30+ breakout assembly...
>
> Has anyone tried one yet?  I laid out a little breakout board
> with a couple LEDs and such for cheaper experimentation, but I'm
> not sure how I'd talk to it to load code/etc.

There are cheaper development tools from third parties.
For example, the following is a demo board with
a license for CrossWorks for ARM (locked to the board).
It is 99 pounds or US$179.
http://www.rowley.co.uk/crossfire/crossfire_lm3s102.html
http://www.embeddedhub.com/development/arm-board/cortexM3-kits.html

CrossWorks for ARM seems to be a nice IDE with GCC, their own libc, ARM
simulator and debugger.

Maybe Olimex or others will come out with cheaper boards without
the bundled IDE.

However, I am not impressed by the spec of the $1 micro.
"The LM3S102  is based on the ARM Cortex-M3 controller core,
with 8KB single-cycle FLASH, 2KB single-cycle SRAM, two timer
modules, watchdog timer, synchronous serial interface (SSI), I2C,
one analog comparator, UART, and up to 18 GPIOs."

I am now trying Olimex LPC-P2148 USB board (US$75) using the open
source gnuarm tools and the open source usb stack from lpcusb
(http://sourceforge. net/projects/ lpcusb). This works under both
Linux and Windows.

Regards,
Xiaofan

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