Over the last few months I have been playing with the Nucleo development boards from STMicroelectronics. If you’re unfamiliar with them, they are fast, mbed and Arduino (headers) compatible. This makes it easy like an Arduino to program and use. What sets them apart is that they are 32bit and have, depending on the model, tons of memory and flash. The Nucleo boards maintain the Arduino footprint but also have headers for the extra pins which gives this board plenty of GPIO for your projects. In turn, you end up with multiple buses such as SPI, I2C, and UARTs for your consumption. They are priced very well and come in different flavors based on your needs. Each flavor is based …
100th Post Giveaway! CLOSED
The 100th post has arrived! So to celebrate, we’re having a giveaway! I wrote about it earlier, and I still cannot believe that it is finally here. I’ve wanted to extend my gratitude to those who follow my blog here, and to the electronics community, especially when it comes to Opensource. Thanks to our friends over at DFRobot for sponsoring this giveaway! A little background about them: as an online shop, they specialize in robotics. They make and sell a variety of boards (offering PCB services), tools, components, kits, etc. If it’s about robots, chances are, they’ve got it. They also plenty of other electronic items. If you’ve yet to hear about them, go check them out! The prize: Dreamer Nano V4.0 Source: DFRobot, with editing by heartsy Description from DFRobot: The Dreamer Nano …
ARM-Powered Arduino DUE
Far removed from the legions of 3D printers featured at this year’s Maker Faire in New York was a much smaller, but far more impressive announcement: The ARM-powered Arduino DUE is going to be released later this month.Instead of the 8-bit AVR microcontrollers usually found in Arduinos, the DUE is powered by an ATSAM3X8E microcontroller, itself based on the ARM Cortex-M3 platform. There are a few very neat features in the DUE, namely a USB On The Go port to allow makers and tinkerers to connect keyboards, mice, smartphones (hey, someone should port IOIO firmware to this thing), and maybe even standard desktop inkjet or laser printers.The board looks strikingly similar to the already common Arduino Mega. That’s no mistake; …
Ti Stellaris LaunchPad
Last week two of these arrived at my doorstep. It’s the newly launched Texas Instruments Stellaris LaunchPad. I pre-ordered directly from Ti a few months ago. https://estore.ti.com/Stellaris-LaunchPad.aspx Specs from Ti.com: The Stellaris LM4F120 LaunchPad Evaluation Kit includes the following items: Stellaris LaunchPad Evaluation board (EK-LM4F120XL) USB Micro-B plug to USB-A plug cable ReadMe First quick-start guide The Stellaris LM4F120 LaunchPad evaluation board offers these features: Stellaris LM4F120H5QR microcontroller USB Micro-B connector for device RGB user LED Two user switches (application/wake) Onboard Stellaris® In-Circuit Debug Interface (ICDI) Available I/O brought out to headers on a 0.1″ grid Switch-selectable power sources: ICDI USB device Reset switch Preloaded RGB quickstart application Supported by StellarisWare® software, including the USB library and the peripheral driver library …
Freescale Freedom-KL25Z has arrived
A few months ago I jumped on the pre-order impluse buy for the Freescale Freedom-KL25Z. Thankfully I had forgotten about it until I recieved shipment notification. It was nice that I didn’t have to wait too long. Today it as arrived. Here are some close-up pictures – thought it would be nice to have some since there doesn’t seem to be any up yet. If you would like to get one, I ordered it from element14newark.com. Here are the specifications as listed on Newark’s website. I cannot wait to start playing with it! FYI: If you order it now, I am pretty sure you don’t get the headers. The orginal listing was a prototype board with headers and when they …
Even Better Renesas Promotion Board: RX62N
My friend sent this to me yesterday. http://am.renesas.com/products/tools/introductory_evaluation_tools/renesas_demo_kits/yrdkrx62n/index.jsp?campaign=top_rdkrx62n If you watch the two videos you can see it is an awesome board. I can’t wait to get mine tomorrow. Shipping is super fast with Renesas. I hope to do some cool things with it.
Renesas Promotion Board for RL78/G13
Yesterday I received my free evaluation board Renesas is giving out to promote their Rl78/G13. Head over to claim your own. http://am.renesas.com/products/tools/introductory_evaluation_tools/renesas_demo_kits/yrpbrl78g13/index.jsp They ship super fast. I put in the order at 4:25pm and had it before noon the following day. Now to put it to the test…