Looking for a big arm developement board

[Spikee]

Hello ,

A week ago i finished my first embedded project and i experienced the limitations of 8bit micro.
In coming projects i have to use big graphical displays, ethernet, some sensors and a couple protocols.
I have limited arduino / avr (atmel studio) / cortex m3 (CooCox) expirience.

An example:
2* 8 channel 12bit adc (I2C) or (SPI)
Color display + touch screen
Serial communication
Bluetooth / radio
Ethernet
a couple of outputs
Real time clock
Temp sensor (analog or digital)
Light sensor (analog)


I have used Cortex M3 ARM before and i found it pretty nice , but it missed documentation to get me started on some more complicated protocols. Mikroe have some nice developement boards for around 160euro. The EasyMx Pro V7 for stm32 / stellaris.
http://www.mikroe.com/arm/development-boards/



There are 2 versions , one for stm32 and one for stellaris. Is one better than the other ? Or is there a better alternative to the Mikroe boards ?

gr. Spikee

[andyturk]

If you want to spend a lot of money, go ahead and buy one of those big development boards. If you want to save some cash and still have a powerful dev board, spend $10USD and get a STM32VLDiscovery board:



It comes with a fairly small microcontroller, but you can easily desolder it and drop on a STM32F103 with 1M of flash and 96K of RAM. One of the nice things about STM32 parts is they all use the same pinout, so any of their LQFP-64 processors will work on the board.

[Spikee]

I bought the stm discovery a long time ago ... but never played with it.
I'll have to play with it some time. But is there any advantage to use the STM 32 over the stellaris platform?
What i like of the EasyMx Pro is that it is plug and play and it comes with full schematics and code documentation.'

gr.spikee

[nctnico]

How about a Beagle board? At some point running Linux makes things a lot easier. Interfacing your ADCs and sensors through I2C is a piece of cake.

[Spikee]

That also looks nice , but it might be a bit overpowered.
A lot of choices ...

[TheDirty]

I'll have to play with it some time. But is there any advantage to use the STM 32 over the stellaris platform?

The Stellaris is an M3 part.  TI has put all their M3 parts on the backburner right now, so it's not recommended.

Some people really like the everything on a board mikroe style development boards.  I'm not one of them.  Very few things on the board are the components I will actually be using.  I much prefer what Andyturk posted; just buy or make breakout boards for the components you will be using and wire them in as you want them.  Only my opinion, though.

[free_electron]

Ti is pulling the plug on their 'inherited' arm processors.... Stellaris is a luminary micro descendant.

I have the stm board from mikroe. The advantage over the explorer boards is that you can swap cpu's and you have a pushbutton, led and two testpoints per pin. Plus the displays ,
You dont have to futz with breadboards to quickly build a prototype

[Spikee]

Guess i'll just buy it. MikroElektronika support seems awesome and the documentation will help me learn a bit more about programming.
I'll have to put some of my experiences whit the system on youtube / forums because you don't see too many of them.

just a random thought ... i should really start a website to show off my college / hobby projects stuff.

gr.spikee