Several months ago I decided to try some development tools from MikroElectronika. I bought the following hardware/software components:
$99.00 mikromedia for Stellaris M3 board with
- 320 x 240 TFT color display and touch screen
- Stereo MP3 Codec chip
- Battery charger
- microSD memory card socket
- 8M bit serial flash memory chip
- Accelerometer chip
- USB mini-B connector
$10.35 microSD card
$2.00 plastic pen stylus
$13.90 Li-Polymer battery
$99.00 Visual TFT (graphical development tool)
$299.00 microC PRO for ARM (compiler)
$49.00 microProg (programmer)
Straight out of the box I was able to load and run the demo programs that came on a disk. I decided to give the product a better workout by writing a fairly large and complicated application. You can download the complete project at http://www.libstock.com/projects/view/382/traffic-flow-recorder-tfr
Almost immediately I discovered a bug in sprint library and reported it to the MikroElektronika team. They will fix it in the next release of microC some time by the end of the year. In the meantime, they suggested a workaround which also failed in some circumstances.
On the whole, the hardware seems to be solid and the mix of peripherals on the board can go a long way in satisfying many projects. Building a board like this in small quantities from scratch would run much higher than the $99 price tag.
The documentation including schematics is quite good and there is a wealth of information on their website.
I chose the ARM micro board but they make the same thing with a PIC32.
The VS1053 Midi Audio Codec chip does a great job as an iPod playback. I wish they had connected the microphone input pins to an external jack. That would make it possible to use this board for a Universal Language Translator. One output channel would be used to feed back the speaker’s voice out of phase to try to mute it. The other channel would provide the translated output.
$99.00 mikromedia for Stellaris M3 board with
- 320 x 240 TFT color display and touch screen
- Stereo MP3 Codec chip
- Battery charger
- microSD memory card socket
- 8M bit serial flash memory chip
- Accelerometer chip
- USB mini-B connector
$10.35 microSD card
$2.00 plastic pen stylus
$13.90 Li-Polymer battery
$99.00 Visual TFT (graphical development tool)
$299.00 microC PRO for ARM (compiler)
$49.00 microProg (programmer)
Straight out of the box I was able to load and run the demo programs that came on a disk. I decided to give the product a better workout by writing a fairly large and complicated application. You can download the complete project at http://www.libstock.com/projects/view/382/traffic-flow-recorder-tfr
Almost immediately I discovered a bug in sprint library and reported it to the MikroElektronika team. They will fix it in the next release of microC some time by the end of the year. In the meantime, they suggested a workaround which also failed in some circumstances.
On the whole, the hardware seems to be solid and the mix of peripherals on the board can go a long way in satisfying many projects. Building a board like this in small quantities from scratch would run much higher than the $99 price tag.
The documentation including schematics is quite good and there is a wealth of information on their website.
I chose the ARM micro board but they make the same thing with a PIC32.
The VS1053 Midi Audio Codec chip does a great job as an iPod playback. I wish they had connected the microphone input pins to an external jack. That would make it possible to use this board for a Universal Language Translator. One output channel would be used to feed back the speaker’s voice out of phase to try to mute it. The other channel would provide the translated output.