Recommendation for an ARM development board.

Mandor · 2009-12-25 22:47:56

I'm considering buying some development board with an ARM CPU (I consider it has more pace than MIPS in the moment) because I intent to start playing with embedded systems and I want to have some real hardware. Since it is only a beginning, I would like not to invest too much money, possibly up to 200 EURO (or less, of course ). I'm not really familiar with all the classes of ARM CPUs and also don't know what to expect from a development board (board, cpu, some devices??), so I would like to seek an advise. I need just a starter board, to have some real hardware to put real code and see it running - nothing really fancy, Ability to use development tools in Linux is a big plus, of course.

I will appreciate your advises highly, so if some of you has experience in that area, please collaborate.

Thanks in advance

--
Petar

wuischke · 2009-12-26 10:25:28

Hi Petar,

I own a BeagleBoard and I paid less than 150€ in total (including import tax). It runs Linux (I used OpenEmbedded, Ubuntu and Debian) and has an active community around it. The processor is a 600 MHz TI Omap3 (armv7 architecture, Cortex-A8), there's 256MB RAM and USB. Getting a serial cable is recommended (you can built one yourself) and I use USB wireless for networking. It's a pity I lack the time to do more on it, I wanted to help getting Arch to run on it.

There's also the Efika MX , a similar but faster system (FreeScale 800MHz Cortex A8, 512MB RAM), but it's $250 and there appear to be some hardware problems with the bus speed.

There are also gumstix systems, very small and mature, but I have no personal experience with them.

I hope this helps you - I can only recommend the BeagleBoard, it's a very nice little system.

Grazz256 · 2009-12-26 17:03:08

What kind of device do you intend to build?

If you just want to play with microcontrollers pick up a cheap AVR, there are a number of cheap options, and the community support for them is amazing. There is also a full suite of linux build tools.
I just picked up a couple of these:
http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_ … cts_id=199

For more advanced systems you will want something faster/more powerful one cheap options ive seen is:
http://mbed.org/
Which is pretty interesting because you don't need any special hardware for programing it.

I would really like to pick up a beagle board when I get some money together (read get a job hehe).
Keeping in mind that you can run XBMC playing 1080i video from a Beagle board for most applications its going
to be overkill.

Cheers

Mandor · 2009-12-26 19:54:57

Hi, thanks for the answers

I also thought that getting a board that is more powerful and has more RAM than one of my older PCs around is in a way overkill for the task I really just want to get started with programming some real hardware.

I want, though, to have some peripherals, some IO, with which I can do real things - like ADCs/DACs, serial ports (232/485), possibly Ethernet port, at least some LEDs or even few digits n-segment display. Some kind of flash card will be needed too.

So, my first board is somewhere between the small pc and the business card sized chip. I will have to choose it by myself, after all, but the directions above give nice start

As a whole I am more interested in embedded systems that control machines etc, rather than in embedded systems that run embedded versions of desktop applications. At least for now

wuischke · 2009-12-26 22:34:06

Mh, in this case, maybe the popular Arduino boards will be more useful to you. There are add-on cards for about everything and programming is done in C. Just as another pointer.

Edit: Grammar

Last edited by wuischke (2009-12-27 09:10:41)

Grazz256 · 2009-12-27 04:11:48

Arduino is a good starting place, they are very popular these days and quiet cheap, ~20-60 CDN depending on which version you chose. I'm a little against them, but only because I like to be different hehe

I like the teensy usb for two main reasons, #1 it fits into a breadboard, this is a really nice feature so you don't have to use multiple cables/wires to connect things together (it cleaned up my desk really nicely!)
and #2 Its USB programmable with out any special hardware
actually I'll add a #3 on, it has a built in USB controller so there is no worries about usb->serial links etc (some/most of the arduinos are like this)

The teensy can also run arduino code (teensyduino) which may be a benifit to some.

check out www.hackaday.com to see some cool projects, usually with writeups

Cheers

anton123 · 2010-04-12 13:36:01

> I want, though, to have some peripherals, some IO, with which I can do real things - like ADCs/DACs, serial ports (232/485), possibly Ethernet port, at least some LEDs or even few digits n-segment display. Some kind of flash card will be needed too.

I found a board with plenty of interfaces: ethernet, rs-232, 2 USB, CAN, A/D conerter ..... I am working on it and it's quite nice.

This is the board: http://www.deditec.de/de/embedded/prod/ … pu800.html
and here is the ealuation board: http://www.deditec.de/en/embedded/prod/ … e1000.html

Last edited by anton123 (2010-04-12 13:36:26)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-12-25 22:47:56

Recommendation for an ARM development board.

#2 2009-12-26 10:25:28

Re: Recommendation for an ARM development board.

#3 2009-12-26 17:03:08

Re: Recommendation for an ARM development board.

#4 2009-12-26 19:54:57

Re: Recommendation for an ARM development board.

#5 2009-12-26 22:34:06

Re: Recommendation for an ARM development board.

#6 2009-12-27 04:11:48

Re: Recommendation for an ARM development board.

#7 2010-04-12 13:36:01

Re: Recommendation for an ARM development board.

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