Recently mikroElektronika has been so kind to send us a couple of samples of their latest ARM development tool series.
The latest mikroElektronika ARM development tool series
mikroElektronika is known for their broad range of development boards especially in the PIC series where the most common board is their
EasyPIC board. Now they have done it again and come up with a new product line – the ARM series.
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About a month ago Texas Instruments started their so called TI Deals – “A cool new way to get discounted tools and kits from Texas Instruments”
The service is an advertising stunt by Texas Instruments which lowers the price of some of their development tools in a specific period.
The first product to be lowered in price were their EZ430-Chronos watch. A watch with their CC430 MCU inside with wireless connectivity.
The regular price for the watch was $49.00, though as it being the first product in their new “TI Deals”, the product were sold for $24.50 – 50% off! Including free shipping.
An extremely cheap price for a good looking watch (maybe a bit big) with developer possibilities. So I decided to get myself one – and luckily for me I ordered one in time, as they went out of stock pretty fast!
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Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Application you used the part in: Evaluation of PIC32 USB Starter Kit II
Was everything in the box required?: Yes
What were the biggest problems encountered?: It requires some time to find the sufficient examples, and unfortunately most of the examples are pre-compiled HEX-files, so it is impossible to change something in the demos.
Though it is possible to find the same demos in the Microchip Application Library, it’s difficult to get theese working together with the Multimedia Expansion Board.
Scoring
Product Performed to Expectations: 10
Specifications were sufficient to design with: 8
Demo Software was of good quality: 8
Demo was easy to use: 7
Support materials were available: 8
The price to performance ratio was good: 9
TotalScore: 50
Prelude
In this review I will be demonstrating and reviewing the PIC32 Multimedia Expansion board. This is a expansion product from Microchip, which extends the capabilities of their PIC32 Starter Kits. In the end you will find my conclusion, whether you should buy this board or not.
In the following review, the Multimedia Expansion board will be called MEB board.
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A couple of weeks ago I recieved a Spartan 6 module from ZTEX. In this blog post I will be reviewing this excellent FPGA board.
ZTEX Spartan 6 module
The
ZTEX USB FPGA Module 1.11 contains not only the Spartan 6 FPGA. It contains:
- Cypress CY7C68013A EZ-USB-Microcontroller
- Xilinx Spartan 6 XC6SLX9 to XC6SLX25 FPGA (I’ve got the XC6SLX25)
- 64 MByte DDR SDRAM
- MicroSD socket
- 128 Kbit EEPROM memory
- 48MHz Clock for the FPGA (going out from the Cypress)
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