Looking for a big arm developement board - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Spikee
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 11:57:53 am
content: Hello ,A week ago i finished my first embedded project and i experienced the limitations of 8bit micro.In coming projects i have to use big graphical displays, ethernet, some sensors and a couple protocols.I have limited arduino / avr (atmel studio) / cortex m3 (CooCox) expirience.An example:2* 8 channel 12bit adc (I2C) or (SPI)Color display + touch screenSerial communicationBluetooth / radioEtherneta couple of outputsReal time clockTemp sensor (analog or digital)Light sensor (analog)I have used Cortex M3 ARM before and i found it pretty nice , but it missed documentation to get me started on some more complicated protocols. Mikroe have some nice developement boards for around 160euro. The EasyMx Pro V7 for stm32 / stellaris.http://www.mikroe.com/arm/development-boards/There are 2 versions , one for stm32 and one for stellaris. Is one better than the other ? Or is there a better alternative to the Mikroe boards ?gr. Spikee

author: andyturk
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 12:46:49 pm
content: If you want to spend a lot of money, go ahead and buy one of those big development boards. If you want to save some cash and still have a powerful dev board, spend $10USD and get a STM32VLDiscovery board:It comes with a fairly small microcontroller, but you can easily desolder it and drop on a STM32F103 with 1M of flash and 96K of RAM. One of the nice things about STM32 parts is they all use the same pinout, so any of their LQFP-64 processors will work on the board.

author: Spikee
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 01:01:48 pm
content: I bought the stm discovery a long time ago ... but never played with it.I'll have to play with it some time. But is there any advantage to use the STM 32 over the stellaris platform?What i like of the EasyMx Pro is that it is plug and play and it comes with full schematics and code documentation.'gr.spikee

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 02:05:14 pm
content: How about a Beagle board? At some point running Linux makes things a lot easier. Interfacing your ADCs and sensors through I2C is a piece of cake.

author: Spikee
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 02:24:08 pm
content: That also looks nice , but it might be a bit overpowered.A lot of choices ...

author: TheDirty
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 03:11:36 pm
content: Quote from: Spikee on January 31, 2013, 01:01:48 pmThe Stellaris is an M3 part. TI has put all their M3 parts on the backburner right now, so it's not recommended.Some people really like the everything on a board mikroe style development boards. I'm not one of them. Very few things on the board are the components I will actually be using. I much prefer what Andyturk posted; just buy or make breakout boards for the components you will be using and wire them in as you want them. Only my opinion, though.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 03:34:51 pm
content: Ti is pulling the plug on their 'inherited' arm processors.... Stellaris is a luminary micro descendant.I have the stm board from mikroe. The advantage over the explorer boards is that you can swap cpu's and you have a pushbutton, led and two testpoints per pin. Plus the displays ,You dont have to futz with breadboards to quickly build a prototype

author: Spikee
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2013, 08:44:33 pm
content: Guess i'll just buy it. MikroElektronika support seems awesome and the documentation will help me learn a bit more about programming.I'll have to put some of my experiences whit the system on youtube / forums because you don't see too many of them.just a random thought ... i should really start a website to show off my college / hobby projects stuff.gr.spikee