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. Read more…
Evaluation Type: Development Board, PIC32 Application you used the part in: Arduino form-factored development/prototyping Was everything in the box required?: The box only contains the board itself, nothing else What were the biggest problems encountered?: Shield compatibility with other Arduino shields (should be 3.3V compatible)
Evaluation Type: Development Board, ARM Cortex-M4 Application you used the part in: QuadCopter Was everything in the box required?: The box only contains the board itself, nothing else What were the biggest problems encountered?: It is hard to find a good but inexpensive or free compiler
Evaluation Type: Development Board, ARM Application you used the part in: Embedded Graphics Display Was everything in the box required?: Yes! A USB A to USB Mini-B cable was also required for programming What were the biggest problems encountered?: None – it’s a very easy board to use for a beginner, just like the Arduino
Evaluation Type: Development Board Application you used the part in: Easy embedded development with microprocessors Was everything in the box required?: Yes What were the biggest problems encountered?: Requires an internet connection for software development (compiling)
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!
Evaluation Type: Development Tool Application you used the part in: Signal generation Was everything in the box required?: No, but Yes if you want to customize What were the biggest problems encountered?: The power supply on the board gets really hot when used
Evaluation Type: Development Board Application you used the part in: Development/evaluation of the LPC1768 part Was everything in the box required?: Yes What were the biggest problems encountered?: Examples only provided for the Keil uVision compiler
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. Read more…
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)
Spartan 6 module content
The first impression of the board is a nice design, it looks good and it feels good. The second great thing about the board, is that almost every pin on the FPGA has been brought out, and even also some of the Cypress microcontroller pins. It is also possible to customize the Cypress microcontroller firmware. There are also some connections between the FPGA and the Cypress microcontroller, which makes it possible to develop applications that uses both the FPGA and the Cypress microcontroller.
As the Cypress microntroller has a USB capability, it is also used to upload designs to the FPGA, but it can also be used in your own applications.
When I first got the board it was kind of difficult getting started. Though the ZTEX website contains a lot of documents, schematics and layout, and they have a nice Wiki, I kind of missed an easy “Getting Started” guide.
But after reading the Wiki a couple of times, I downloaded their Firmware/SDK package and got their FWLoader running. The FWLoader is a Java application used to communicate with the Onboard Cypress microcontroller over USB.
To communicate with the Cypress microcontroller, you can use their FWLoader, found in their ZTEX EZ-USB SDK. To begin with, you have to upload the firmware for the Cypress microcontroller, which takes care of programming the FPGA. To do so, you have to copy “standalone.ihx” to the java folder (inside the SDK), and then afterwards execute the following command.
After executing this command, it was now possible to communicate with the Cypress microcontroller using the commands explained on their FWLoader Wiki page. I was able to upload my first bitfile to the FPGA using the following command.
java -cp FWLoader.jar FWLoader -uf <bit-fil>
In the video above you can see my first experience with the board, getting a couple of LEDs to blink. I’ve used the 48MHz Clock, prescaled it, and made a simple counter – it worked 🙂
So in total, it wasn’t that difficult to get it running. The things that was difficult, was figuring out how their FWLoader worked, and how I should upload new designs. Though their Wiki was a great help!
As the Spartan 6 has a lot of power, I am sure that this will be a well-used board, and I can already imagine getting the LatticeMico32, a 32-bit open soft core processor, to work on this.
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