[James Lynch] picked up an LPCXpresso board because he wanted play around with ARM processors. The board, which is shown on the right, provides everything you need to get started. It even ships with a free IDE. But unfortunately the free version of that Code Red IDE is size limited. If he wanted to remove the restriction he would have to pony up $999 for a licensed version. A company might not think twice about this payment, but in the hobby realm that’s simply out of the question. Instead, [James] figured out how to use the CooCox programmer with the LPCXpresso hardware. To get at his 59-page guide on the process follow that link and hit the “Download Zip” button in the lower right for a copy of the PDF file.

The hack comes in two parts. First you need to alter the LPCXpresso board. There is a center line that separates the dev board form the debugger/programmer. These are connected with solder bridges between rows of a dual pin-header. [James] removed the bridges and added said pin header. This allows him to jumper the connections and use it as normal, or attach it to his CooCox programmer as seen above. The second part of the project walks through the process of getting the free CoIDE (also based on Eclipse) to compile and program code for the LPCXpresso.

We’ve seen this dev board here and there, notably in an oscilloscope build.