Galago, The Latest In A Series Of Awesome ARM Boards

September 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

Long time Hackaday reader [Kuy] sent in a project he’s been working on for the last year and a half. It’s called Galago, and it wraps up all the features we’d like to see in the current crop of ARM microcontroller dev boards into one neat package.

The Galago features an AMR Cortex-M3 microcontroller running at72 MHz. Included on its pinout are 25 digital IO pins, 6 analog input pins, 10 PWM pins, and an I2C and SPI port.

The Galago isn’t simply an exercise in hardware development, though. [Kuy] spent a great deal of time writing proper libraries for his board, allowing you to get started with the Galago very quickly without having to rely on crippled tools.

A proper library isn’t Galago’s only significant developer feature: [Kuy] went as far as to create a browser-based IDE (no Internet connection required, thankfully) that has the ability to upload code directly to the board via a USB cable. Add in a hardware debugger, and the Galago might just be the perfect ARM board for tinkerers weaning themselves off the Arduino.

[Kuy] has released the Galago on a Kickstarter, with a single board costing $25. It’s a cool device, and something we’d really like to come to market.

The Easiest Way To Dive In To ARM Programming

September 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 47 Comments

[Brad] has been very excited about an ARM Cortex-M0 chip released by NXP; it’s a fully featured ARM microcontroller, and is, quite amazingly, stuffed into a hobbyist and breadboard-friendly DIP-28 package. After finding a supplier for this chip, [Brad] dove in and put together a great tutorial for programming an ARM on the breadboard using open source tools.

The chip in question is NXP’s LPC1114FN28, a 28-pin breadboard friendly chip we’ve posted about before. After finding a single supplier for this microcontroller (only $1.26 for one chip!), [Brad] pulled out his breadboard and started wiring things up.

Because this microcontroller has an on-board oscillator, wiring up a breadboard and putting in a breakout for an FTDI cable was a snap. After configuring a toolchain and writing a bit of code, the only issue was uploading the code to the chip. This was handled by the lpc21isp programming tool, slightly modified and configured by [Brad] to support his favorite microcontroller.

The LPC1114FN28 is an impressive bit of kit, and with free tools to program the damn thing, we can’t wait for a homebrew ARM dev board to show up.

Programming A Propeller On An ARM

September 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

[Stefan] uses a small ARM-powered netbook for his development work, so when he tried to play around with the Parallax Propeller he ran into a few problems. The official tools from Parallax are Windows only, and the available 3rd party dev tools are only compiled for x86. After a lot of futzing about, [Stefan] was able to develop on his ARM netbook and wrote in to tell us how it’s done.

Luckily, Parallax released a GCC port for the Propeller, but unfortunately isn’t completely portable to ARM. The Propeller loader for this architecture ambivalent build uses a little bit of SPIN code, which can only be compiled on Intel machines.

To get around this problem, [Stefan] wrote an installer script to gather all the necessary bits of code to his computer. His ARM/Linux toolchain consists of the Propeller GCC, an open source SPIN compiler, and a Python script used to load code [Stefan] found on the Propeller forums.

Now that [Stefan] has a complete toolchain for programming the Propeller on an ARM device, it’s possible to develop for this very cool multi-core microcontroller on his netbook or even the Raspberry Pi.

DIY ARM Prototyping Board

September 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

We’re impressed by the ARM prototyping board which [Danjovic] is showing off. He proves that in this day of ever shrinking packages it’s still possible to make your own development tools with protoboard and a soldering iron.

To tell you the truth, if he had designed and etched his own board we probably wouldn’t have featured it. But he didn’t need to spend time on the layout, etching, and reflow. Instead it’s just some enamel wire and a lot of patience. The patience is because the NXP ARM Cortex-M0 chip comes in a HVQFN package. We’re not entirely sure about the HV part (the package alphabet was not entirely clear on this) but QFN means Quad Flat No-Lead. That means no legs on the chip. So [Danjovic] glued it upside down and soldered point-to-point to break out all of the pins.

The top side of the board has a bootloader button, reset button, power regulation, and a crystal oscillator. He doesn’t mention what bootloader he’s using, but a Nokia USB cable gives him the connectivity to push his programs onto the chip.

Meet The Teensy 3.0

September 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

[Paul Stoffregen], the brains behind the popular and very capable Arduino-compatible Teensy development board, has offered his contribution to the explosion of ARM-powered boards with the Teensy 3.0.

The original Teensy is an AVR-based development board that goes far beyond the official Arduino offerings. The new and improved Teensy 3.0 improves upon an already wonderful platform with a 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller running at 48 MHz. There’s also a lot of pins available for whatever project you have in mind: the Teensy 3.0 supports 14 analog inputs, 10 PWM outputs, a USB host mode, and an I2S audio interface that will be very useful when accessing the microcontroller’s DSP functions.

There are a couple neat features on the Teensy 3.0 [Paul] somehow managed to work in. In addition to supporting a real-time clock, there are also a few extra IO pins in the middle of the board. [Paul] says the extra pins are due to Kinetis not releasing a 48 pin version of the microcontroller in time for production. It may not be what [Paul] originally had in mind, but we’ll take the upgraded board just the same.

Of course the Teensy 3.0 will be compatible with the Teensyduino Arduino IDE add-on, so if you’d like to run your Arduino sketches on a very powerful piece of hardware, this will be the board to use.

Building A PDA From Scratch

September 2, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

Extremely powerful ARM microcontrollers have been around for ages now, but only recently have they been available for just a few dollars with a good enough toolchain for some serious development work. [Jose] wanted to develop something awesome with an ARM chip he had lying around, so he built a PDA (Spanish, translation) that can be used as a game console, an oscilloscope, a clock, or a wristwatch. Basically, it’s a portable homebrew computer that can do just about anything.

The hardware is built around an ARM Cortex M4 chip clocked at 170MHz. Included on the PCB is an SD card slot, a JTAG interface, a USB port (only used for charging the battery at this point), and a touch screen LCD controller.

After designing the PCB and enclosure, [Jose] looked around the Internet for a decent GUI library without much success. He eventually found Gwen, a lightweight library for programming GUIs that is easily ported to [Jose]’s hardware.

So far, [Jose] has a few GUI demos up and running on his homebrew PDA, but nothing very useful yet. Still, the fact that [Jose] can get a full-featured ARM tablet-like piece of hardware off the ground without a team of developers brings a smile to our face. We can’t wait to see the state of homebrew ARM devices in a few years when everyone has the requisite hardware and software knowledge.