[Arm-netbook] UART

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Baybal Ni <nikulinpi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Zync will likely be an overkill. What is its price?
>
> Are we looking for 32 bit mcu?

 not per se, but i was thinking along the lines of something that's
highly functional (lots of interfaces), fast (72mhz or above),
versatile, low-cost ($1.50), and, importantly, has a Free Software
Community built around it as well as decent free software libraries
and a toolchain (none of this java-based arduino bullshit!)

> PIC32 was long time on my mind, but
> it's MIPS core based. This is not bad by itself, but we may be ending
> providing support for two architectures at once if we will go with arm
> for CPU. It has open toolchain. It also have extensive IO and its
> price shouldn't be bigger than a buck in minimal configuration.
>
> STM32, dont know much about it.

 it has libopenstm32 behind it, which is GPLv3 which makes me much
more interested in it (as opposed to this rather truly dreadful

 also, leafpad do the maple (arduino-compatible) which has a community
built around it already.

 but, the real thing that has me rolling around on the floor is that
the leafpad guys ported embedded-python to it (pymite).  apparently
it's possible to do an interactive prompt by remote connection!  for
some reason i find this hilarious.


> Freescale has quite functional and performant M3 based Kinetis MCUs.
> Its downside is packaging. It comes in 200+ pins configurations.

 yes - the STM32F comes in 48, 64 and all the way up to 100 pins is i
think the biggest.

> There are also atmel 32bit cortex based mcu. Their biggest plus is
> that new arduino is based around them.

 yeah... that's a very new CPU.  also, pricing is $3.50 in really
quite large volumes, vs about $1.70 for really quite small volumes off
of taobao.com for the exact same STM32F that's used in the leafpad
Maple.   which is also in an arduino-compatible form-factor.

 still a winner with the STM32F in my mind :)

 someone argh i wish i had a better memory for names... someone
suggested one of the TI ECs a couple weeks back.  TI's pricing puts me
off, despite the good support.

 l.