Texas Instruments just open preorders for the new Stellaris LaunchPad. The boards won’t ship until the end of September, but if you don’t mind the wait you can get one for $4.99 including delivery (we’d wager non-U.S. addresses have to pay for delivery, but leave a comment if you know for sure several readers have reported that international shipping is free).
We routinely pay more in shipping for parts orders so we already jumped at the opportunity and put in our own order. Earlier in the month we heard the first murmurs about the device. We’re glad to see they hit the $4.99 target price, but the TI website mentions that this is a promotional price that will be available for a limited time only. The board boasts an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, the Stellaris LM4F120H5QR. It includes 256 KB of flash memory, 32 KB of SRAM, and more peripherals than you can shake a stick at. To get you up and running quickly they’ve included two user buttons and an RGB LED. As with the 16-bit Launchpad, the board acts as its own programmer. It has a microUSB jack, but they’ve included a micro B to USB A cable in the kit to make sure you don’t need to also put in a cable order.
We’ll give a follow-up post once we finally get our hands on the board. We hope this will be easy to get working with a Linux box!
[Thanks Chris]
At this point, maybe “delivered” is an overly strong word?
Free shipping also for non-US addresses (The Netherlands)
Free shipping to Brazil too. (ordered two of those)
And I think they will pay customs again, (see below my other post) as this week I received the other boards with paid customs, crazy, just crazy! :-o
Free shipping to Hong Kong too! Just ordered two!
I got free shipping to The Netherlands ;)
When I ordered the $4.99 MSP430 LaunchPad, I didn’t have to pay for delivery. I live in Romania. I expect it to the same with this board.
Just ordered 2, and it was no extra cost to Norway.
It says “Shipping Included in Price of Item” to the UK. Great deal, TI!
Bought two!
Ordered the *limit* of two boards to be sent to Austria and was billed only the $9.98 (no extra fro shipping). Seems to be *free shipping* worldwide. Gotta love it!
Do you know if the bank card is charged when the order is placed or when they start shipping next month?
Nevermind :)
“Note: Funds will be collected when your order ships.”
they charge your card straight away even though they say that.
They block the amount on your card right away, but the transaction is finalized later. It was the same with RPi and many other pre-order deals.
And they do not unblock this amount if they cancelled your order. Now I have to wait 30 days with “frozen” money.
My card has been charged right after checking out
The original launchpad is a 16-bit MCU fwiw, not 8-bit (minor nitpick :-))
Also, there’s a wiki page that talks about TI’s launchpad BoosterPack layout which attempts to set some standards for how the pins will be used & what options are available- http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/BYOB
Oops, you’re right. Fixed!
International delivery is also included in the price – no additional costs were charged for delivery to Poland.
Free shipping to Poland, indeed :)
Ordered two to Poland. Can’t wait
Yup, two more of them coming this way.
Bought 2
Got an email, they charged me already. Should be here the 10th
No shipping cost for France.
Just ordered mine. I’m from Europe/Portugal.
They didn’t charge anything for delivery :)
Nice :D
Estimated time to arrival: 05 Oct 2012
How long will it be before we see a post about someone cutting this board in half? ;-)
Not far I believe:
http://forum.stellarisiti.com/topic/194-breakaway-jtag-on-the-stellaris-launchpad/
That’s why I ordered two. :)
25-Sept-2012 plus 2 to 4 weeks
haha
/Lamer
Free shipping to Canada. Ordered two, thanks for the tip.
Anyone know about the toolchain, simulation or programming under a linux environment?
I’m also wondering about this. The problem is two-fold. We need to be able to use the programmer, and we will need linker/startup files that will work with the hardware.
linker script and startup stuff shouldn’t be much different from any other ARM micro.. I would worry about being able to actually load code onto this thing.
/me is pissed my j-link is toast
Two ordered .jp for $9.98 I had rolling around in the bottom of my paypal account.. I think it’s safe to assume that shipping is included worldwide.
Keep your eyes open in the threads below. Sooner or later someone will come up with a tutorial:
http://forum.stellarisiti.com/topic/183-notes-on-setting-up-a-stellaris-toolchain-with-gcc/#entry441
+2
I wonder when they’re going to start shipping the Raspi. I ordered mine about 18 years ago, haven’t heard a thing.
You ordered a Pi from Texas Instruments?!
i loled hard
Really? Mine showed up at my door three weeks before I ordered it.
Does anyone know where you can get little plugs (with wires coming off them) that fit on those header pins so I can easily attach peripherals to the thing?
>Available I/O brought out to
>headers on a 0.1″ grid
So the female jumper wires that you can get from china on ebay would be fine for wiring stuff up with flying leads..
Dealextreme sell packs of female jumpers pretty darn cheaply.
Search “dupont pin header” on ebay.com
Free shipping also for non-US addresses (Australia)
Thanks for posting this — I was waiting for the e-mail from TI telling me it was available… it didn’t come :(
I got my email about the same time as the HaD post.
:/ Okay… well, I guess that means I’m out of the running for the free one too. Since I just ordered 2 of them, I guess I don’t care much.
Ordered it :)
Datasheet says no PWM on the 120 series?
Page 43
See page 706
PWM Mode
A timer is configured to PWM mode using the following sequence:
1. Ensure the timer is disabled (the TnEN bit is cleared) before making any changes.
2. Write the GPTM Configuration (GPTMCFG) register with a value of 0x0000.0004.
The table, I’m guessing, is indicating the LM4F120H5QR does not support any “Motion PWM” outputs.
However, looks like the the timer module supports 12 PWM output pins.
See page 59 / section CCP Pins.
What does “Motion PWM” mean anyways?
Someone told me they could boot windows on this…… Practically impossible…. Any os’s you could load on it?
You can run an RTOS on here but that’s it. This is more for embedded processing.
Looks like hackaday has contributed to the DDoS. I’m unable to access the store! not even through a proxy!
You killed TI’s store! :D
Store seems to be working again – I got my order in a couple of minutes ago, after several failures earlier in the day.
Took me 10 minutes of trying before I got into the TI store.
Have two of these babies ordered up, can’t wait to get them. This is even better than the MSP430 launchpad deal was :-)
How does this compare to the STM32F4 Discovery eval board, also based on the ARM Cortex-M4? I still have an eval board gathering dust since I got it when Hack A Day mentioned it a while ago.
This Stellaris board is outclassed by the ST board :
TI
80MHz max
128K flash
32K RAM
No external peripherals
ST
168MHz max
1MB flash
192K RAM
Audio DAC w/class D amp, MEMS sensors, etc.
The TI processor / board seem more targeted at industrial control…or so says the documentation. It doesn’t natively support I2S, for instance.
I still bought two when TI emailed me…can’t go too wrong when the whole board is the price of the MCU itself with no shipping.
But the ST board isn’t $5 shipped. I think It’s a pretty good promo.
ST’s development environment sucks.
On Windows it doesn’t work unless you’re logged in as Administrator.
ST doesnt recognize the power of “getting them while they are young”. TI ships those cheap dev kits at a loss (even absorbs shipping) in house.
ST insists on resellers like arrow or element’teen. Thats great if you target companies or established developers, but will not grow your customer base. Students/ hackers/ kids like cheap, dont like being raped by surcharges and expensive shipping.
I agree. And it doesn’t help that ST doesn’t have an in-house toolchain [not last time I checked, anyhow]. They force everyone to use third-party tools. Having options is great, but not having a free, ST-supported toolchain makes it harder to get into developing for the STM32 line.
Atmel and Microchip have always done a good job there, offering everyone a decent set of free tools. The choice to not use them is always an option, too.
I hope that TI’s strategy includes catering to that demographic by offering an uncrippled version of CCS. Reducing the barrier to entry with quality free development tools eliminates the cost of development as a valid excuse for not using their ICs. I assume they will at least offer a board-locked version of CCS, so that’s a start.
Ditto questions about the toolchain for the Stellaris. I used one in a contest a couple years ago, and the only thing directly available was a Keil system for $1K+. The contest organizers provided a “free” copy that promptly died after the submission date.
Hopefully a flood of $5 dev boards will precipitate some open-source solutions.
As far as the toolchain, I suspect you will be able to use Code Composer Studio, an eclipse based IDE that includes Linux support. I think you can get at least some version of this for free from TI.
Probably an unrestricted version tied to the board
http://forum.stellarisiti.com/topic/186-will-ccs-be-free-for-the-stellaris-launchpad/#entry445
Tried to order 2 to Ukraine, and got this message:
“Items in your cart may have been removed based on product availability. Please review your cart before proceeding with checkout.”
Nothing remained in my cart. Bummer.
Try again – the store was failing earlier today.
I got that message even when my order succeeded, but it did show that I had the one board I was trying to order. I don’t know if the “removed” boards were really removed, or just a warning that it might have done that, or if it was fixing the three or four unsuccessful attempts…
he. My order failed the first time with an unknown error so tried again and the second time succeded.
Then after checking my orders I see that was placed twice and have 4 boards pending to ship!
Thanks, hope it’s not that laggy like back at evalbot rush.
discovery board STM32F407VGT6 microcontroller featuring 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F core, 1 MB Flash, 192 KB RAM in an LQFP100 package
it’s m4 board ARM CORTEX-M4F 80MHZ 256KB Flash 32KBSRAM 2KB EEPROM
<a href="http://forums.arm.com/index.php?/topic/15986-just-got-an-stm32f4-discovery-board-needing-a-little-help/"
No idea what I’m gonna do with them yet but I ordered the max of two. The site seems slow but it worked for me.
It would be f**king great if someone made a bus pirate out of one of these…I seem to remember someone making a logic shrimp out of the last launchpad.
yes buspirate on this would great.
It’s a bit silly that you have to supply a bunch of company information when they know damn well that there’s mostly hobbyists ordering these. Rather than making up info I opted to not order at all. Meh.
Do they really “know” hobbyists are buying these boards?
If they don’t their market research department is doing a lousy job.
They’re clearly aiming it at the hobbyist market, with that price tag of $5. Big corporations don’t care so much about price, they are more concerned about support and long-term availability. After all, if they’re going to pay $7k on the development software, $5 or $100 on the development board don’t make much of a difference.
But I’m so pissed I can only order two of these. I’d like to stock a couple more and give away another couple to friends.
All three of those non-required “Company Name” fields were enough to put you off, huh? Shame about that.
I put “Consumer electronics – other”, and indicated that I wasn’t an arms dealer or whatever. If their marketing people can’t figure out that my company named “none” isn’t really selling stuff, too bad.
I may be wrong, but I believe they are required to ask those questions to export, almost everytime I buy microcontrollers from the US I have to answer some kind of variation of one of those. The last time I ordered XMEGAS from mouser they had to ask similar questions by email before shipping.
Kind of silly, I’m pretty sure a super-villain would not say they would be used for global domination…
Ordered 2 to the UK, free shipping,
Looks like a lot of fun to be had!
Free shipping all the way to New Zealand :D
shipping to Czech Republic is also free. I put in ‘no company’ as the company name and ‘none’ into company url. I wonder if it’ll work…
Depends if they write that on the package. Ceska Posta can be a pain depending on what time of the month it is ;-)
For some reason after i login my cart is empty and i can not “buy” again, tested on chrome and firefox
Because once again TI offers a product than not everyone can order.
but they do not tell you this!!
Status: E C C N or Restricted S K U
come all the way to payment (after customs questions) to get stuck @ “processing” (cant fill out billing info)
Ordered two from Argentina, free shipping also.
Anything special? some how i cant make the cart work!
Nope, I just saw this post and went into TI’s site for checkout. It was a 2-minute thing. I think I just had luck.
I paid with paypal and already had a TI account btw, don’t know if that matters.
Had the same problem, worked around it by creating a new account. I’m thinking there must be some problem with TI accounts not linked to the shop, or something.
Ordered two, Now, What can I do with these? :P
I ordered mine, shipping to the US of A for free !
free shipping to New Zealand
This might be slightly offtopic, but would this be a good board to start learning to work and program micro controllers?
I have a fairly large coding experience, both professionally and as a hobby, but never did really try to work with anything other that computers and I’m interested in learning. For 5$ shipped this seems to be cheap enough to risk buying it even if I don’t end using it for anything.
So… opinions? worth it to learn? capable/easy enough for a couple of beginner projects so I can decide whether I like it or not?(any resources on this topic would be appreciated too)
For learning, you’ll get the benefit of learning the very latest chip (at least from TI), but the downside is very new stuff tends to have a lot of rough edges.
I’ll pick one then, It’s cheap and I have a month to figure out what I want to do with it and buy the necessary sensors/LCD/whatever.
Thx.
The same f***ing bullshit, you cannot order if you are in Asia.
I am in INDIA and just ordered mine, the order went through.
He probably meant he can’t order from China… The Chinese often think of Asia as being part of China.
Successfully ordered 2 from Latvia/EU – no additional shipping costs (money already got substracted as well).
I did not realize, I could skip Company name. Well, I put company, where I work in anyway (although they do not do anything remotely in common with electronics).
Just ordered mine, free shipping to INDIA, for $4.99 it is a steal..
Its not a steal its Highway Robbery!
Do you know that our wonderful Customs Department insists on charging 100% Duty on import of Development Tools ?
Which means, apart from the loss per board, TI is also paying around $40 shipping to India, plus another $10 Customs Duty.
(posting here to raise awareness, and hopefully embarass http://www.cbec.gov.in/ into changing their policies on tools that can only help improve India’s economic condition.)
I don’t know but I’ve never had to pay customs on any tool that I have ordered. If its a company address they charge what ever they want, to residential addresses there is no problem. TI uses FedEx which gets bulk custom clearance.
Same on Brazil, customs tax it at 100% of product price + shipping. It seems third world countries refuse to evolve.
For some reason I just bought two! Happy to report no extra cost on shipping to South Africa.
I used a company name that a friend and I proposed but have not done anything to start it. And its website, well that is my Hackhut page!!
I have never used a Launch pad so this should be interesting :)
i just got my two, dont know yet what i am going to do with it, maybe tie it up to an arduino for that extra easy of use ^^
“Ah Zoidberg, at last you’re becoming a crafty consumer….I’ll take 8!”
Another 2 on the way to South Africa, hope they don’t ship DHL as they have some strange ideas on customs clearance PROCESSING fees.
I hope the device can target the LM3S series as well, I can get these cheap locally. Bonus if it can target other ARM devices, I was contemplating buying a Jlink clone.
You should be able to:
http://forum.stellarisiti.com/topic/194-breakaway-jtag-on-the-stellaris-launchpad/