suggestion needed to buy LPC1766

[abhishek.embsys]

Hi all
i want to learn arm cortex m3 and planning to buy Olimex LPC1766.
i am new to arm processor but have extensive experience on 8052 and keil.
would this board good for beginner to learn cortex m3?any thing else i would be required to buy along with board i.e. cable, IDE or any other thing not included in package to work on given sample programs?
i also intend to learn graphical LCD that's available on board. actually i intended to learn cortex m4 but may be cortex m3 would be a good starting point and since ecos have been ported on LPC1766, it would be easier to learn ecos as well and explore more.
or i should look for some other board?
what do you suggest?

please reply

regards
Abhishek

[pacman]

I'd go for the Olimex LPC1766 board and a JTAG adapter.
If you don't have a JTAG adapter already, I can tell you that my Olimex-ARM-USB-TINY-H works fine; I've successfully gotten it to work with Olimex SAM7-P256, and now also hand-soldered LPC1768 and hand-soldered LPC43xx.

As for computer software, you have a lot of choices. Personally I use gcc+openocd on a PowerPC based Mac.

Compiling gcc and openocd may be a bit overwhelming if you haven't tried it before. If that's the case, you should try one of the ready-built toolchains.
If you have Windows or Linux, no problem; get Yagarto.
If you have an intel-based Mac, it'll be possible to get Yagarto working.
If you have a PowerPC based Mac, you need to talk to me.

I recommend buying pre-assembled boards. An Olimex board is a good choice; you are not on your own, if you run into problems.
-If, on the other hand, you choose to build  your own board, and you run into a problem, it's easy to get stuck (I've been there).

Regarding Cortex-M3, you have several choices. There's Atmel's SAM3, some STM boards and of course LPC.
I highly recommend LPC, due to the possibilities in the chip. The chip is *FAST*, it has a lot of awesome features, when compared to the others. You could perhaps convince Olimex to fit a LPC1768 or LPC1769 instead of the LPC1766, if you want.
The LPC1769 runs up to 120MHz, whereas the other 176x runs up to 100 MHz.
The difference between LPC1766 and LPC1768 seems only to be the amount of Flash memory available to you.
The 1766 has 256K Flash, the 1768 and 1769 has 512K Flash.

You should know there's a lot of resources at lpcware.com. Use the search function in the top right-hand corner.
Also, you can browse sw.lpcware.com.
You can download the files via git by...

git clone http://git.lpcware.com/lpc175x_6x.git

...or download compressed archives by...
http://sw.lpcware.com/?p=lpc175x_6x.git&a=snapshot&h=HEAD&fmt=zip&f=latest

...I hope this helps.


Love
Jens

[LubOlimex]

Hello Abhishek,

just to add some more info after the nice post by pacman.

To my mind good boards for ARM beginners are:

STM32-P107 https://www.olimex.com/Products/ARM/ST/STM32-P107/
STM32-E407 https://www.olimex.com/Products/ARM/ST/STM32-E407/
STM32-H407 https://www.olimex.com/Products/ARM/ST/STM32-H407/

Once you got some practice with the basics you might move onto boards with more peripherals OR purchase and connect extension boards (the ones that start with the "MOD-" prefix).

Depending on the software of choice you will need a debugger.

If you go with the free CooCox IDE(http://www.coocox.org/CooCox_CoIDE.htm) there is the ARM-JTAG-COOCOXhttps://www.olimex.com/Products/ARM/JTAG/ARM-JTAG-COOCOX/. Its big advantage is the presence of built-in SWD support.

If you go with the OpenOCD supported programs (or pure OpenOCD) then a good choice is the ARM-USB-TINY-H: https://www.olimex.com/Products/ARM/JTAG/ARM-USB-TINY-H/. The advantages of OpenOCD debuggers are: 1. good support in almost all IDEs; 2. a lot of users and friendly community; 3. we distribute a free Eclipse-based IDE that works out-of-the-box with the mentioned boards and our OpenOCD debuggers: https://www.olimex.com/Products/ARM/JTAG/_resources/OpenOCD. However, OpenOCD still lacks proper SWD which means these debuggers are not likely to work with SWD-only microcontrollers (say Cortex M0).

Best regards,
Lub/OLIMEX