Surprised nobody mentioned TI chips.
The Tiva C LaunchPad and Connected LaunchPads are great ARM chips -- the TivaWare suite is free and really well written. Extremely documented, each member of the family has a datasheet that's ~2000 pages, however it's still an easy read and quick to find what you're looking for.
Entry price is quite low, around $20 for the cheaper one, running all the way up to the Tiva C Connected Development Kit with on-board touchscreen LCD, ethernet, SD card slot, huge SPI Flash, etc. Plus, all their boards have on-board debuggers and programmers. Free version of Code Composer Studio supports the LaunchPads without restrictions, if I remember correctly.
A bit of full disclosure: I write about TI parts for element14. I wouldn't say I'm too biased, I just have a lot more experience with them and find their documentation excellent. The E2E forum is good too.
And, as a last bonus, it all works on Linux!
I wouldn't recommend TI, they recently re-branded their Stellaris family, silently, due to some very serious flash errata's.
They do sell some interesting "realtime" arm's though, Hercules if I'm right.
Surprised nobody mentioned TI chips.
The Tiva C LaunchPad and Connected LaunchPads are great ARM chips -- the TivaWare suite is free and really well written. Extremely documented, each member of the family has a datasheet that's ~2000 pages, however it's still an easy read and quick to find what you're looking for.
Entry price is quite low, around $20 for the cheaper one, running all the way up to the Tiva C Connected Development Kit with on-board touchscreen LCD, ethernet, SD card slot, huge SPI Flash, etc. Plus, all their boards have on-board debuggers and programmers. Free version of Code Composer Studio supports the LaunchPads without restrictions, if I remember correctly.
A bit of full disclosure: I write about TI parts for element14. I wouldn't say I'm too biased, I just have a lot more experience with them and find their documentation excellent. The E2E forum is good too.
And, as a last bonus, it all works on Linux!
I have both a Stellaris and Tiva C launchpad that I had purchased at different times, not knowing they were pretty much identical. I've never gotten around to programming them yet. They still have the original demos on them.
I have used my MSP430 board with CCS to make it blink and also used Energia which I think works with the ARM chips as well.
Agreed, the TI Launchpads are pretty good, as are the various NXP LPC boards. For both, the respective development tools are free.
(I have 20 years' experience in PICs, and have moved from PICs to ARM in the past six months or so. This was after Microchip launched their PIC32MZ which was promising if you read the marketing stuff from the launch a year ago, but the silicon was very late, and it under-delivered as the silicon still has tons of bugs. To add insult to injury, Microchip were forcing the developers to learn a brand new, and very buggy programming paradigm anyway to use the new chips (Harmony), so I took the decision that if I was going to have to learn something as fundamental as that, I might as well try something that was more mature.)
TI has a restriction on the hardware debugger you can use, it has to be either an XDS100 or a debugger integrated onto the dev board, and NXP simply have a 256KB code limit, both are $495 to unlock. So, you can do an awful lot with both without having to make a big investment.
I found that the biggest problem with ARM is knowing which one to choose, you need to spend a bit of time just investigating the different ARM levels. Unless you're already really into microcontrollers in a big way, I would seriously recommend go for the low end devices first. The complexity of the chips and peripherals at the upper end makes it really hard to get started much beyond running example code. As soon as you want to do anything serious, you need to start opening the startup, chip and board code for your own use, and learn the chip. The LPC43xx series, for example, are enormously complex, just the clocking scheme will take many hours to master. Some of the peripherals on the higher end LPC devices are truly complex, the good news being that peripherals like the State Configurable Timer and the Serial GPIO can replace CPLD functions, but boy are they a bitch to fathom out.
Between TI and NXP, the TI development environment feels more polished, both are based on Eclipse. Both have bolted on stuff to the base Eclipse environment, the NXP stuff feels a bit more flaky when debugging, but with TI's CCS you need to thoroughly understand the way the file link process works to get much beyond compiling and running the sample code.
Although the customisations of the Eclipse UI gets you started quickly on their dev boards, as soon as you want to do anything with your own hardware you need to unpeel the thick veneer they've added, and understand how it hangs together, so you can create a project from scratch. Once you've removed the lipstick, you get to really understand what's going on, but it is time consuming.
One final thing, although it seems to come with the turf these days, the dev environments are being continually updated, m maybe once every month or two. The frustrating thing is that sometimes this breaks things, I had this when updating from CCS 6.0.0 to 6.0.1, and it can take a while to figure out not least because of the makeup they've added that somewhat obfuscates what's going on under the hood.
Edit to add something about the documentation...
The documentation is a minefield, but that goes for every chip manufacturer these days. Firstly it's the sheer volume, both in PDF and in various online sources like wikis. Some of it, particularly the wikis, can be pretty low quality, leaving you with more questions than answers. NXP tend to have a smaller number of documents, but their documents are large and lack descriptive diagrams, favouring millions of tables instead. TI on the other hand have tons of documents, generally individually of good quality, but it leaves you scratching your head as to where to start. I also absolutely hate the naming conventions used for PDF documents these days, a series of seemingly random characters. Would it be so hard to add some kind of descriptive title within the filename too?!
I wouldn't recommend TI, they recently re-branded their Stellaris family, silently, due to some very serious flash errata's.
They do sell some interesting "realtime" arm's though, Hercules if I'm right.
I am aware of some ROM bugs in a few APIs, but not flash in the devices I've used. the ROM bugs are easily fixed by using non-ROM versions.
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't want to start out on ARM with the Cortex R such as Hercules, that's a bit of a deep-dive, and not really much value unless you're into mission critical stuff. There's a load of added complexity in particular redundancy in there without any benefit for most applications.
Between TI and NXP, the TI development environment feels more polished, both are based on Eclipse. Both have bolted on stuff to the base Eclipse environment, the NXP stuff feels a bit more flaky when debugging, but with TI's CCS you need to thoroughly understand the way the file link process works to get much beyond compiling and running the sample code.
Does the TI Eclipse IDE run also on Mac OSX and Linux?
I had similar dilemma recently and settled down on NXP. Their Eclipse IDE was easy to install and works great on my mac OSX. Typically I use it with the LPC11u35 USB/ISP and in rare occasion with a full debugger (
http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/OM13014,598/568-7517-ND/2700004 ).
CCS is available for Windows and Linux, not OS x as far as I know.
I use it in Windows, like it or not (and I am definitely not inviting an OS debate here, so don't start), it's the most supported platform for most dev tools.
I have seen some comments about CCS being a chore to install on Linux. I'll leave it at that I think!
If I hadn't already purchased chips and demo board there would have been no further interest. Then I discovered the chips have internal RC oscillator only and will not work with a crystal. It got worse when it turned out the demo board "programmer" is not a programmer at all but just a usb/serial interface and you must purchase their $89.99 programmer to flash new chips. Other issues too. Because they go to great length to hide these defects I foolishly purchased even more parts before wising up.
Wow, a lot of hate for PSoC. I think your complaints about lack of crystal support and the MiniProg 3 costs are quite warranted. That said, the platform has a lot going for it. Compared to other ARM chips, I found the Cypress IDE very easy to learn and get running. Having a UI for configuring chip resources is much better than the common way of doing it in code. The IDE's dialogs linking to the datasheets and examples is simple but works well. The flexibility and pin mapping of the chips is also very nice.
Considering Arduino gets by with just a bootloader, the Cypress dev boards are a pretty good value. If you are someone who needs to program a bunch of chips, the cost of the MiniProg isn't too unreasonable. But there is a middle ground where it is a problem. Someone who wants a step above Arduino but not to the level of developing professionally is left with an expensive choice.
RE Miniprog3, and sorry for being off topic, but answering other off-topic (but kind of related) posts.
If you want to play with the new PRoC BLE
You can get the mouse:
http://www.cypress.com/?rID=102637Or the remote control:
http://www.cypress.com/?rID=102638$49 each And both include a MiniProg3
Also Cypress has mentioned lately that they are working on bringing the MiniProg3 price down, maybe they have too many available out there (digikey, mouser, etc..) that might be preventing them to lower the price right now, not sure how that works.
CCS is available for Windows and Linux, not OS x as far as I know.
I use it in Windows, like it or not (and I am definitely not inviting an OS debate here, so don't start), it's the most supported platform for most dev tools.
I have seen some comments about CCS being a chore to install on Linux. I'll leave it at that I think!
Thanks.
BTW, OS support is a valid feature to discuss. I don't understand your concern.
...Considering Arduino gets by with just a bootloader, the Cypress dev boards are a pretty good value. If you are someone who needs to program a bunch of chips, the cost of the MiniProg isn't too unreasonable. But there is a middle ground where it is a problem. Someone who wants a step above Arduino but not to the level of developing professionally is left with an expensive choice.
The embedded artists lpc11u35 board comes with usb/ISP bootloader (all you need is a micro USB cable, debugger is optional) has multi os eclipse IDE and is inexpensive.
Wow, a lot of hate for PSoC.
I think "strong dislike" was the phrase used and it was more for the company than the PSOC chips themselves. Actually the whole SOC concept fascinates me otherwise I would not have got involved at all. That, coupled with the fact they are available in small qty for around a buck, still motivates me. Also GCC tools instead of proprietary is a plus. So there are major advantages over some of the ARM families and no competition in the SOC camp. Except for that, IMO the LPC and STM come out shining a little brighter. Anyway too much time and money invested to just give up.
there is a middle ground where it is a problem. Someone who wants a step above Arduino but not to the level of developing professionally is left with an expensive choice.
Yes, that was my situation when I decided to see how many different low cost easy to program ARMs were available. Dozens of different part numbers from several companies so it does add up.
RE Miniprog3, and sorry for being off topic, but answering other off-topic (but kind of related) posts.
If you want to play with the new PRoC BLE
You can get the mouse:
http://www.cypress.com/?rID=102637
Or the remote control:
http://www.cypress.com/?rID=102638
$49 each And both include a MiniProg3
Also Cypress has mentioned lately that they are working on bringing the MiniProg3 price down, maybe they have too many available out there (digikey, mouser, etc..) that might be preventing them to lower the price right now, not sure how that works.
But, when will those kits be available?
I would guess there is an miniprog 4 in the works or something since they lower the price like this.
Edit: Miniprog4 is actually mentioned here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nicechips/comments/2m3drr/psoc_4_ble_arm_cortexm0_ble_analog_digital/
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the $25 PSoC4 Pioneer kit can be used to program/debug an external ic, although a minor modification is needed. See page 107
here for details.
CCS is available for Windows and Linux, not OS x as far as I know.
I use it in Windows, like it or not (and I am definitely not inviting an OS debate here, so don't start), it's the most supported platform for most dev tools.
I have seen some comments about CCS being a chore to install on Linux. I'll leave it at that I think!
Thanks.
BTW, OS support is a valid feature to discuss. I don't understand your concern.
Totally agree, it is worthy of discussion in the context of what platforms are supported by the dev tools, but what's not of interest are the endless and pointless religious-style OS debates that frequently happen, that was what I was referring too, sorry I didn't make that clear, my bad.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the $25 PSoC4 Pioneer kit can be used to program/debug an external ic, although a minor modification is needed. See page 107 here for details.
I didn't know that, I knew you can make your own programmer based on the Pioneer Schematic.
I used that discount code to get me a 2nd pioneer to use as a dedicated programmer. At the moment I was using the source code released for kitprog 2.03 and routing SWDIO and SWDCLK to use the 5LP header I'll check on taking away those 0 ohm resistors instead.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the $25 PSoC4 Pioneer kit can be used to program/debug an external ic, although a minor modification is needed. See page 107 here for details.
I didn't know that, I knew you can make your own programmer based on the Pioneer Schematic.
I used that discount code to get me a 2nd pioneer to use as a dedicated programmer. At the moment I was using the source code released for kitprog 2.03 and routing SWDIO and SWDCLK to use the 5LP header I'll check on taking away those 0 ohm resistors instead.
I've converted 2 pioneer kits to programmers/debuggers.
Looks messy, but works well.
btw, BLE pioneer has PSoC target chip on a module, so all programming pins are on header -> no soldering should be required.
but that mouse/remote kit sounds like a much better deal if it was available.
I'm looking to learn some C, for ARM micros. I need a good starting point, if anyone has any suggestions it would be appreciated.
A bit late here, but I'd recommend the following free online course:
https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-utaustinx-ut-6-02xYes, it uses a cheap TI Launchpad, but it doesn't matter that much for starting to learn ARM processors. Other than the Launchpad, they don't use much more than a few resistors, LEDs and a solderless breadboard. You can even do most of the course in simulation, but they won't award you enough points to pass that way - you have to do some labs on the real hardware to pass.
I did this course for fun early this year. It would be way too basic for many around here, but good as an intro to C on ARM processors IMO.
Does the TI Eclipse IDE run also on Mac OSX and Linux?
CCS works on linux. Don't know about OSX.
I have seen some comments about CCS being a chore to install on Linux. I'll leave it at that I think!
Don't recall any particular problems getting it to work on debian... Currently using CCS 5.5.0.