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 address
…the promo is targeted at engineers - use the crippled IDE supplied with the board
…due to hard to find (non-existent?) documentation for the integrated LPC-Link - upload an original video of the physical destruction of a competing board to the NXP website
While killing your Arduino may not sound like the most fun, some qualified readers may be interested in moving up to 32-bits for a price that is hard to beat.
@Cool please stay on-topic. Derailing this comment section even more isn’t something you should do. Your the reason this place is going down hill. Just keep to the subject at hand, free project boards. Thanks.
BTW, NXP seems to have given up no this strategy. I got a recent email (at my large company official work email address) offering a free LPCXpresso board in return for completing a very short and general “survey” about microcontroller use. (sorry; no link. It was keyed to my specific email address…)
Same. Ironically, the form was already filled in from my previous registration for the first iteration of the program.
heh wow, i just got a board and i failed to read the instructions before ordering and they sent me 1 anyway
Just got mine after sending an email, seems they lost my entry, they found it and expedited shipment.
I can’t be bothered to d/l the IDE. Free as is cost, but not the tools to work with it.
Back to my AVR TYVM.
Ok, now that I have gotten the board and played with it, I’m confused.
I didn’t pay for the IDE, it was a free download. And once you complete the free activation, it will program a target up to 128kB size flash, which is well over the size of the dev board. So how is it ‘crippled’ exactly?
Also, I love the heck out of it. The IDE is nice, built around/like eclipse and the debugger works well. It comes with a ton of sample code including a freeRTOS demo.
Now I want to try one of there M3 boards.
mine arrived 3 days ago – took exactly 2 month from sending in the video – nice when they keep their promises:-)
Apparently this was also a contest; top entries get a $100 baseboard in addition to the eval board. Guessing this one: http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/lpcxpresso/xpr_base.php
Got an email today saying my entry was one of the top and I get a baseboard. Woot!
Well, I got one.. Haven’t used it except few times. Too complicated. For the requirement I ran the PCB milling machine router through an old OTP Atmel chip.. Piece of cake