For our final year school project two classmates and I decided to make a ARM Cortex dev board. We made it because the Arduino(required by school) lacks stuff like debugging and a powerful IDE. When making big (school)projects this can get a bit annoying. At my last internship at NXP semiconductors I learned to work with the ARM Cortex devices made by NXP. Also I discovered the CooCox programming environment and debugger. All this combined and 5 months of hard work later the dev board, called the Simplecortex came out :)
NXP and our school liked it a lot so we contacted Iteadstudio to see if they would be interested in making it. Luckily they liked it to and with the help of Iteadstudio it is now officially released. The Simplecortex has an Arduino compatible layout and uses an Eclipse based IDE. To make it simple to use we made a bunch of tutorials and libraries to get people started. It also has some cool stuff onboard like MicroSD and Ethernet. Our website can be found here: http://www.simplecortex.com
To be honest, none of us is good at webdesign and the release was earlier then planned. So the website is still in beta and hard to find with Google. We are working on that at the moment. All tutorials and such is online, so the most important part is there :) Most info can be found on our website but if you have any questions please ask. This is all quite new for us (actually selling something we made) so critique is welcome, just be gentle please :)
Hmm, the title of the topic is Cheap PCB manufacturing timelines So, for that, normally when i order PCB's from Iteadstudio it takes 3 to 4 weeks after ordering to arrival, with DHL shipping less then 2 weeks mostly. Eurocircuits (not cheap but i needed stuff FAST) did it in 5 days, ordered on Monday, got PCB's on Friday. They can do faster but prices tend to be amazingly high then. For PCB's, i throw away non working stuff, doubt i got a picture of a failing PCB.
Hmm, The user manual says that the DMA can go up to 150Mhz, but i might be looking at it the wrong way. It can control 100Mhz+ FLASH to run code from so 62,5Mhz sounds slow to me. I might be able to test it tomorrow :)
The other option is a FPGA with a softcore in it (Altera NIOS for example) Those are quite easy to use and very flexible.
If package is no problem, the DMA on the LPC4300 package should be able to reach some high speeds. They have a LQPF208 package but i am not sure if you can buy it at the moment. As the uC runs at 200+ Mhz max the DMA should be capable of at least 100+ Mhz It also has 2 cores, a M4 and a M0 ARM Cortex core. Downside is that only BGA is available at the moment and the only dev board is a Hitex one (300+ dollars)
I got this in the mail today: A FPGA dev board with 32MB SDRAM, 8MB flash and 0.5MB SRAM. It got a EP2C8 FPGA, fun fun :D It came with the adapter (next time, email ebay guy that you live in the Netherlands, else you get an unusable adapter) and LCD Tweezers so happen to arrive at the same day. Ow, right, if you order a USBBlaster FPGA programmer from seller A and a dev board from seller B you WILL get the dev board first and WILL be waiting impatiently for the programmer :(
i saw something interesting in my email from elektor. they tested a TI dev board and came up with a benchmark to define how easy to use a microcontroller board is. i like the idea becouse some dev boards are easy to use and some are a pain in the ass. there benchmark is quite simply: biggest HDD available / size of included IDE (mouse clicks before it works * icons on desktop) maybe not the best benchmark (nothing about included documentation and examples) but i like the idea. more info is on there blog: http://elektorembedded.blogspot.com/201 ... t-and.html
now, how much hw's does you're favorite dev board gets :D
i think you mean something like http://tgimboej.org/ :) for dutch people there is a big and a small one going around, if someone from holland wants to know more, PM :)
Eindhoven, Netherlands and San Jose, California, October 25, 2011 – NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) today announced the availability of new low-pin-count package options – SO20, TSSOP20, TSSOP28 and DIP28
ow hello there ARM Cortex in DIP, how are you today:
Altium has a student license for ~100 euro's a year. only for non commercial use just like eagle free. altium has a lot of functions, i tried it a while ago but i have to use eagle for school atm. I'm thinking of working with the demo (30 day trial) this xmas and when i know how it works just get a student license.
When i read something in a datasheet about how to route USB (impedance routing etc etc) its almost impossible in eagle. Calcurating the resistance of a trace, altium should be able to do that, eagle, not so much. altium is even harder to begin with then eagle ans less used by hobbyist, its a professional PCB program with everything needed for insane stuff like a 8 layer PCB with some bad-ass BGA FPGA on it.
The best thing is time, take a lot of it :) i have projects that took me months because i got stuck at something, threw it away and after a week or 2 looked again. most of the time the 2 weeks time solve a lot :)
a small update, first schematic of the CPLD board. http://http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/2375/scopecpu.png there are some obvious flaws, no transistor to switch the relays, no AGND. next time i want to have the PCB's done and schematics updated :)
the price is a bit low but you get some heavy power for that. 16MEGAbyte of RAM, 4.5MB flash, USB host and more. the .NET micro framework is fully open source, visual studio is one of the best programming environments IMHO. much much better then the arduino IDE, i personally like it better then eclipse. downside is the price, but GHI has some cheaper modules in arduino footprint to.
