Toshiba Electronics BMSKTOPASM369 Starter Kit for ARM-Cortex M3 MCU

Toshiba Electronics will unveil the BMSKTOPASM369,  a new Starter Kit for ARM-Cortex M3 microcontrollers at Embedded World 2012. This devkit based on Toshiba TMPM369Fxxx Cortex M3 MCU  which combines Ethernet, CAN and USB Host and Device connectivity in a single IC. Toshiba will also showcase new software tools that speed-up and optimize embedded designs for motor control applications. This development board features an integrated power supply and offers rapid prototyping and testing for applications ranging from industrial control systems and barcode readers to motion control, home appliances and solar inverters. The Started Kit is based on TMPM369Fxxx series 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 MCU running at 80MHz  with up to 512KB flash and 128KB RAM. The 4 MCUs in this series also integrate the following: Single-channel CAN2.0B Full-speed USB Host controller Full-speed USB device controller 10/100BASE single-channel Ethernet MAC. 2x 12-bit ADCs suitable forbarcode readers and other applications requiring ultra-fast conversion. 2x […]

Pengutronix uCLinux 3.2 for Energy Micro EFM32 Cortex-M3 Gecko MCUs

Energy Micro and Pengutronix announced that they will be demonstrating µClinux for Cortex-M3 on the EFM32 Gecko range (Leopard and Giant) of MCU during  Embedded World Conference 2012 on 28 February – 1 March 2011 in Nuremberg, Germany. Pengutronix’s port of µClinux features the Linux 3.2 kernel, providing the cost and time-to-market benefits of Linux operating system, while maintaining low current consumption of just 1.6mA when in idle mode. The company explains that using µClinux reduces design cycles and accelerates time-to-market by giving the designer access to ready-made system functions such as IP connectivity, file systems, and multi-tasking. Users can also employ the broad range of free software and drivers available as open source, within a robust, portable open source framework. The teaser video (below) shows that the demo platform (Giant Gecko Development Kit?) uses 4 MB of RAM (755 KB used after boot-up) and the MCU delivers 9.07 Bogomips. […]

Linux for Cortex M3 & M4 Microcontrollers

There are plenty of low cost Linux development boards based on Cortex A8 or A9 such as the Beaglebone, as well as some devkits based on ARM7 and ARM9 such as SAM9 development kits , but if your application is cost and/or energy sensitive you can also switch to micro-controllers using Cortex M3 or M4 based development boards such as Emcraft SmartFusion devkits. You can run a functional uCLinux system with 1MB of RAM and 1MB of flash including the TCP/IP stack. You need to use uClinux and not directly Linux, because the Cortex M3 doess not have a Memory Management Unit (MMU) and only a Memory Protection Unit (MPU). This can bring some interesting software development challenges such as (apparently random) kernel panics, the lack of fork, memory fragmentation and more. You can check out http://kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/uclibc/Glibc_vs_uClibc_Differences.txt for the main differences between uClibc and Glibc. The instructions to patch and […]

Cypress Semiconductors PSoC Development Kits

Cypress Semiconductors was at Embedded World 2011 exhibiting their PSoC 5 development kits based on ARM Cortex M3 and analog & digital programmable modules. They had different development boards and demos based on PSoC 5: A simple board with PSoC 5, capacitive sensing, radio and accelerometer where they lit up a LED when the board moves  (CY8CKIT-014 kit – see below for details). A similar board with a dot-matrix LCD and a potentiometer, where they display the voltage at the Analog input on the LCD. (CY8KIT-010 kit – see below for details). A full development kit with PSoC 5, PSoC 3 and PSoc 5. (CY8KIT-001 kit – see below for details). Several demo of multi-touch and motion sensors capabilities etc.. The development kits are already available (engineering samples), but PSoC 5 will only be mass-produced in Q3 2011 since they are currently qualifying the chip. You can see the development […]

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