Free (…as in ‘free beer’) ARM kit

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NXP holds a lot of market share for their ARM based solutions as it is. That's why we were a little surprised when we found a link on their website announcing that they were giving away free LPCXpresso development boards, based on their Cortex-M0 line. Catches? Unfortunately there are a few to get the board shipped and running. In order to do so, you must... register with a corporate email … [Read more...]

SmartLCD makes video for microcontrollers easy

TFT-for-microcontrollers

[Rossum] developed a host board that makes it easy to drive a TFT screen using an inexpensive microcontroller. He's looked around at a bunch of LCD's that are easy to get your hands on and decided that the iPod Nano 2G screens are the right balance of performance (176x132 TFT) and low cost ($1-$5). They're not particularly difficult to talk to, but with 22 pins they're a bit hardware hungry. He … [Read more...]

Gaming system for less than three bucks

[Rossum's] latest project just hit and as usual, he doesn't disappoint. Using an ARM cortex M0 he built a gaming system for less than $3 in parts. The M0 is a bit underpowered for this but at $1 it can't be beat in price. He worked some video generation voodoo to get the signal he wanted but also mentions that upgrading to a bit more expensive chip like the Cortex M3 would solve this problem. The … [Read more...]

Build your own Wikipedia reader

diy-wikipedia-reader

One part inexpensive uC, one part touch-screen, one part Internet knowledge-base all come together to make up this Wikipedia reader. It functions in a very similar way to commercial versions by parsing XML dumps from the popular website to an SD card for use on the device. This is not limited to Wikipedia, but could just as easily be an e-reader. [Rossum] developed the package using an NXP ARM … [Read more...]