Newark/Farnell Product Review
It seems the Big Mess o’ Wires blog has reached the threshold where companies will send their products to be reviewed. I’m flattered. Newark (or Farnell for those of you in Europe, Element 14 in Asia) has kindly offered to send me a product of my choice from their catalog, anything 25 GBP (about $39) or less.
What kind of electronics parts are people interested in seeing reviewed? Tools? Development boards? Programmers? Kits? Specific ICs? My first thought was a demo board for one of the less common microcontrollers (not AVR or PIC), like the MSP430 or an ARM variant.
Check out www.newark.com, and post a comment if there’s something specific you’d like to see reviewed here.
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Yeah, I’d like to get into ARM because of the amount of computing power available but I don’t know where to start. Reviewing an ARM board would be great. Thank you for everything that you do.
That sounds like a good idea. The Gameboy Advance and Dual Screen (Nintendo DS) system families both use ARM 7. The DS adds ARM 9 to games running on ‘Slot 1’. If you’re a developer, there’s cards for under $10 that turn it into a generic ARM system. Too bad that they’re pretty gray legally thanks to the whole piracy issue. 🙁 In France, they’re not even gray level but fully black. If it’s legal where you live, then you can get a pretty cheap ARM system with tons of RAM and ROM space, a serial port builtin, possibly USB(some models), a color LCD, buttons to control it, and a builtin lithium battery for around $70 including the cart.
My WRT54G-TM router is at least legal no matter where you live and is actually slightly less. It comes with two Ethernet ports (one w/switch), MiniPCI slot, twice the original 54G’s RAM+Flash ROM space, a roughly 216MHz ARM-based CPU (7 or 9 I think), a nicely convenient JTAG header, a (disabled but easy to enable) SD-card capable serial port, LED indicators, plastic case+12V power adapter, and an existing Linux distro. This is probably a good board if you’re just wanting to learn programming but not so for hardware hackers. I think you can find similar routers for around $30 US new (and possibly way less used on Craigslist) including S/H and the $5 JTAG adapter+header. Just solder your header, build the JTAG adapter, and plug it in. Just like that, you have a legal and off-the-shelf ARM system to play with. Sadly, it doesn’t have an LCD but you can make a virtual display using Ethernet and a computer.
Anyone know of a better solution that doesn’t have these issues and doesn’t cost $150? Or at least is more useful to a hardware prototyper? MiniPCI isn’t very convenient to make quick prototypes with.
72R4200 is a very basic breakout kit. This might be a good one and is at the price range they specify. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that they PLANNED on you selecting that one! 😉
Unfortunately the 72R4200 ARM board requires a separate ARM programmer, which costs more than the board! I requested the STM32VLDISCOVERY discovery instead, which has a built-in programmer.
Oh, OK. I figured that most people have some kind of programming tool already since I’ve made tons for different protocols. I2C/SPI/JTAG/SMBuss (serial), EPROM/Game cartridge (parallel), and so on. I would have thought you could get or make a cheap programmer since there’s so many designs out there. I guess I was wrong on this board.