[sdiy] ARM thru-hole options - was Propeller CPU

[nicolas]

I have also been recently experimenting and learning on AVR 8bit, but looking to move to something with more number crunching ability.  ARM seems to be the way to go - affordable, plenty of tools, plenty of community support, reasonable amount of grunt, lowish power consumption.  There are quite a few through-hole-adapter/low-end-development-boards that have the right cost/convenience for my needs.  Some examples among many:

http://mbed.org/order/
 - Not super cheap, but lots of hand-holding available online to get me started (a-la arduino), USB plug and play (cable included), it all seems to just work so far (but I haven't tried to do anything serious with it yet).  Excellent convenience for experimenting, learning, initial development.

http://www.futurlec.com/ET-ARM_Stamp.shtml
http://www.futurlec.com/ET-STM32_Stamp.shtml
 - Seems like good value, but ordering from futurlec does require patience.  RS232 type interface rather than USB so not ideal for modern laptops and it requires its own power supply so not quite so convenient as a development platform.  I just received one of the STM32 boards the other day, comes with a CD of free tools and a serial cable, but I haven't had a chance to put it to any use yet.

http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/lpcxpresso/lpc1768_xpr.php
 - Another low cost option I haven't tried, hard to find in-stock.

Cheers,
Nicolas


--- On Mon, 20/12/10, Antti Huovilainen <antti.huovilainen at iki.fi> wrote:

> From: Antti Huovilainen <antti.huovilainen at iki.fi>
> Subject: Re: [sdiy] Propeller CPU
> To: lanterma at ece.gatech.edu
> Cc: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> Received: Monday, 20 December, 2010, 10:05 PM
> On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:40
> AM,  <lanterma at ece.gatech.edu>
> wrote:
> > On Dec 19, 2010, at 5:13 PM, Paul Maddox wrote:
> >
> >> So I'm looking at the parallax Propeller CPU, nice
> because it's available in DIL format, but also very nice
> cause it's lots of raw power for number crunching.
> >>
> >> So I just wondered if anyone had used it, with
> MIDI or for synthesis and what they thought of it.
> >
> > Paul, you read my mind - I've spent some time over the
> past couple of days reading over material on the Propeller,
> wondering the exact same thing, and was about to post asking
> about it!
> 
> I haven't used Propeller, but I did look into it about a
> year ago. My
> conclusion was that it's largely useless unless you need
> simple timing
> logic in a dip case. For simple mcu applications, avr and
> pic have it
> beat hands down. For number crunching, ARM7 is an order of
> magnitude
> faster (and can be had in a dip adapter). All three
> architectures
> allow using higher level language, such as C.
> 
> Propeller would have been interesting if it had been out
> in, say,
> 1995. Today it's hopelessly outdated while lacking the
> cheap cost,
> simplicity and huge existing codebase of 8 bit mcus.
> 
> Antti
> 
> "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom
> tomorrow."
>  -- Lt. Cmdr. Ivanova
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