At-Home Amature Development

Note: This was originally posted on 16th April 2013 at http://forums.arm.com

Hi guys,

i'm an amature programmer and my main interests  lie in the field of OS programming.
lately i've been thinking about how much i'd love to go a layer below the OS - developing something from scratch!
as i'm familiar with ARM (well, more with the instruction set and the results of compiling C/CPP code) i'd like to purchase
a very simple straight forward (i'd appreciate any tip but i'm on a budget) ARM development board
for the my at-home programming games.

i'm looking for something that i can communicate with via my PC without too much welding,
where i can write my own code that will be loaded at boot time (i'd very much like to BE the first code
that's running and not a commercial bootloader - but i'm not picky about this).

it also needs to be easily debuggable, as i obviously will have no software framework.
also, i'd like to have I/O-s i can use because one of my first goals is to write my own "raw" interrupt handlers.

since i'm just starting, a very simple board (even without mmu support - though i'd like to tackle that as
well on day) with little flash and little RAM will do just fine - i don't intend to compile linux or something
along that line - it will be strictly my code.

a search in google revealed way too many possibilities and it's not clear which boards allow
comfortable amature development.

i was hoping you guys could get me pointed in the right direction and maybe some other people will
benefit from you're replies.


thank you all in advance :)
Parents
  • Note: This was originally posted on 16th April 2013 at http://forums.arm.com

    It depends on what you want do really.

    mbed (mbed.org) gives you a cheap/easy way into bare metal programming with a M class MCU. 

    If you want at some point to run Linux (or a n other OS) then a Raspberry Pi is an option (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), or if you want something with more processing power (and unfortunately a higher price tag) then a Panda board (http://pandaboard.org/).  To do bare metal programming you'd have to buy additional tools for these boards, such as a JTAG interface unit.
Reply
  • Note: This was originally posted on 16th April 2013 at http://forums.arm.com

    It depends on what you want do really.

    mbed (mbed.org) gives you a cheap/easy way into bare metal programming with a M class MCU. 

    If you want at some point to run Linux (or a n other OS) then a Raspberry Pi is an option (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), or if you want something with more processing power (and unfortunately a higher price tag) then a Panda board (http://pandaboard.org/).  To do bare metal programming you'd have to buy additional tools for these boards, such as a JTAG interface unit.
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