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]
dont know why but the link to buy the board is not opening…
Two bought…can’t wait to play with them.
Hmm…their site bugged while I was ordering, and I got two order confirmations (2 boards each)…hopefully I’ll get 4, or at least not get charged for 4.
Their site is down for me…:(
I was trying to order them but when I click add to cart nothing adds in the cart any body having the same problem ? Shipping is to Qatar
Bought 2. Nobody can just buy one can they? :D
When the laser diode started to become available for development ($80 each), the rule of thumb was, “Buy 3, the first two you’ll burn up by just hooking up power, after that, you’ll read the directions on building a current limiter”.
Trying to get my preorder in but the site seems to have been slashdotted (hackadayed?)
They are probably really excited right now, thinking every company on earth has plans for their chip…too bad most of the people ordering these things will not use them for much more than what they could have used an Arduino for, and will never actually make a board and order the chips themselves.
All well…I don’t feel too guilty, with all the TI chips I’ve bought over the years I figure they can afford to send me a cheap dev board once in a while.
Quite possibly a flood of these also means they become more newbie friendly, people blog tutorials, etc.
Got in! One order placed an on its way :-D
Ordered two, got the promised free shipping to Finland too. Price is definitely right, browsed around that webshop and found nothing else that my wallet could support.
Business is booming for the “N/A” corporation, it seems.
Thanks for the heads-up HaD! Any chance we can get some tutorials once the boards ship?
I’m with their biggest rival NA Industries
does anyone know if you can use this for jtag and spi nand flashing? thanks
it looks like nor, nand flashing is suported. “if” you can run u-boot.
+2 Finland.
Another 2 on their way to Australia !
I just hope that there will be a tool chain for Linux for these.
I followed this guide for setting up an arm toolchain in ubuntu and it works if you download the exact codesourcery release it says. I expect they’ll eventually include this board in a stellaris release and we’ll be able to target it with gcc.
I ordered 2 pairs. It seemed like it went through, but we’ll have to see. :)
I ordered 2 to Singapore. No extra cost FTW :)
4 more to Poland – by me and a friend.
Just ordered my pair, super excited to play with something new!
Check it out, the manual is out.
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I ordered my 2-unit limit to test out here in California. OK, now my questions is, where is a GCC header file for this chip? I want to use the gnuarm toolchain with it and not buy another IDE. Anyone know about this?
Crap I am too late, its unavailable now.
Try again. I just made my order and I got the text that they cjarged me for it. +2 @ 4.99 each.
I meant charged. lol.
Damn! Unavailable now.
Just ordered two. Got a order confirmation and everything.
Reading the µC datasheet (http://goo.gl/ykLpn), I see that the ROM includes “Stellaris Peripheral Driver Library” as well as crypto algorithms. How come?
Is it because TI needs to hide the implementation with secret registers that only ROM code can access?
I am puzzled…
The ROM has a bootloader and some lookup tables that come in handy if you wanna implement AES. No secrets there.
That’s a pretty bold accusation!
Since you’re reading the datasheet, maybe you could elaborate on what features supposedly have hidden registers? Can you find ANY feature of this chip without extensive register-level documentation?
I’ve looked the datasheet over briefly (not all 1227 pages) and my initial impression is the hardware and registers seem to be very well documented. For example, the flash memory (which NXP sometimes keeps secret and provides ROM-based routines) appears to be well documented starting on page 525. Likewise, every other peripheral seems to have complete lists of registers with every bit well documented.
I am not trying to accuse any company. Rather, I am speculating based on how e.g. Renesas (former NEC) implements e.g. flash programming.
Will you prefer they not offering those crypto functions? The ROM is needed for the chip to load and run your code. Those cryptos are given for free in case you need them.
The ROM implementation should correspond to what’s in the Stellarisware software packages; AFAIK there aren’t any hidden bits in it. You can always write a little program to dump the memory contents if you’re really curious.
My impression is that it’s simply there as a convenience and cost-saver, because ROM is cheaper than flash.
Just order from singapore, shipping free!! I wished i can order 20 of them thou, based on my history I am bound to destroy lots of these.
I wonder if they’re even notice someone placing 10 orders with different emails and only slight variance in the address?
Just ordered mine. Free shipping to Mexico, that’s rather unusual. Don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet. This is the first MCU I buy.
Ordered two!
** Your order has been cancelled or invalidated.
Cancelled ECCN
I will never again buy anything from Texas Instruments. They have opened their lab at my university, now I have to study/use their DSPs everywhere. And as a result I can’t buy some shitty mcu evaluation board! I promise I’d buy their chips in Europe just to make a radar and to sell it to Iran or DPRK. Xilinx have already tried to f**k me with FPGA board. So what? Digilent Romania sold me Nexys 3.
Ordered 2 pieces and have also had the ordered cancelled; same as Dumb Penguin above.
I’m based in Hong Kong, is this the reason?
Thanks
They have export restrictions for all non-Wassenaar Arrangement countries with some exceptions. And even if your country have already signed this agreement (like Ukraine or Russia) they can invalidate your order. Then you have to contact your local representative and acquire some type of license.
Iran, Cuba, and Syria – Embargo
Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, Belarus, Yemen, Sudan, North Korea, Myanmar, Liberia, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Balkans, and the Cote D’Ivoire – Targeted Sanctions
Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Cyprus, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Libya, N. Korea, Syria, Vietnam, Myanmar, China, Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Democratic Republic of the Congo – ITAR Prohibited Countries
China, Canada, Germany, Iran, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Lebanon, Singapore, South Korea, Syria, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom – Countries with restricted entities
Strange to see Germany, Canada and the UK in the list but I’m sure this is not their case. In general, if you do not live in North America , Japan or the European Union, each purchase is like a lottery. :(
ARM is a UK Company and my last TI kit was made in China – Very strange rules!
As far as I understand ARM only provides a Verilog core. The final IC – LM4F – is a product of Texas Instruments. DigiKey didn’t sell me Terasic’s board, even though they are from Taiwan (Cyclon IV was prohibited for export). They use some Automated Export System, and if your country is blacklisted, they can not export an item, even if they wish. Even a non-US product. I have to buy everything in the EU. It’s unclear, against whom can such a system protect?
Thanks for the info. I really hadn’t thought about any restrictions for Hong Kong. Now we are part of China again I suppose it is to be expected.
Same here. It sucks big time!
Ok, this is just NUTS. I ordered 2 x MSP430 and 1 x C2000 Piccolo LaunchPads, shipping was FREE, and when I got those from Fedex this week, they paid custom taxes!!!!!! That’s just INSANE!!! So in the end, I got those nearly for free, if you count the custom taxes paid by them. :-o TI really want to get more market or what?!…
Oh boy, the stuff you need to download in order to use those things are just insane! :-o But, heck, I will eventually get everything… I think I got things too easy with the Arduino. ;-) Oh well….
Some of us are working on bringing that Arduino ease to 32 bit ARM……
(my own kickstarter has been mentioned enough here on HaD lately, so no shameless link here)
awww no operation for me TI’s website show me status : E C C N or Restricted S K U
I would like to test these new gadget -_-
Im from Venezuela any solution for this?
Mine seems to be scheduled for late november. :(
Oh, well. I’m busy.
Mine too. Maybe as an early or late Christmas present.
Looks like my order got pushed back as well. New estimated ship date 16 November.
I guess it’s a good thing I’m not ready for this little toy yet, anyway!
Be aware that you *CANNOT* add memory (RAM/Flash) to this…it has no external memory controller.
The STMF4 does which is why it can run big stuff like uclinux.
I don’t see how useful this will be…for a powerful processor (relatively), you’d want to run more complicated stuff…
Please go away Ken…
You can ALWAYS add memory to a design, just sometimes it is a little harder than straight line thinking.
Estimated Ship Date 11/02/2012..
The price changed on Ti website.. now 12.99$!
changed again.. 4.99.. strange..
once you buy yours the price rises up to 12.99$, if you are logged in. Otherwise it’s 4.99$. Btw free shipping to Italy as well (order confirmed for the end of November).
I ordered one last night at the $4.99. Once again free shipping to the UK.
Update on Stellaris Launchpad shipping:
http://forum.stellarisiti.com/topic/218-stellaris-launchpad-shipping-details/#entry716
It’ll be interesting to see if we will be able to debug/program this chip with OpenOCD. I don’t think that the latest OpenOCD supports the onboard debugger (ICDI) just yet.
I will probably end up having to use my JLINK EDU (The JTAG pins are made available via pads) until OpenOCD provides support for the board
Is it possible to run linux on this Cortex M? I know you need an A series MMU type of processor but just a broken down version of Linux maybe on a flash drive etc? Is that Possible? Maybe a RTOS?
Theres no MMU for linux, maybe uclinux though. There was a demonstration of a RTOS running on it somewhere.
Ordered two with my business account Sept 10th.
December 14th delivery date estimate *sigh*. I wont even be living here by then.
FedEx delivered the pair I ordered yesterday 10/5! I have a couple of ideas I want to play with but, what to do hmmmm…
Hi, with 32 kbytes of ram you will never get linux running on it !!!
It requires Mbytes of ram
Franck
They are in stock here:
http://liftoffexpress.com/product/stellaris/
If you need one NOW. Costs a few bucks more.
OK, we are adding boosterpack “template” support to KiCad. This should make it easy to make daughter cards for this board, i.e. with a running start.
https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg08992.html
I just unboxed my TI LaunchPad. Does someone have a cross compiled gcc for this board? I’m looking for an Ubuntu solution for programming the board. The RGB LED cycling on bootup is cute.
http://hackaday.com/2012/10/29/guide-to-developing-with-the-stellaris-launchpad-on-a-linux-box/
I recommend you download Sourcery Codebench, as it compiles the USB examples properly. When I compile them with the Summon Arm toolchain they don’t enumerate correctly.