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Looking to start ARM Development!

Zachery Littell
  • Note: This was originally posted on 27th January 2012 at http://forums.arm.com

    Alright I am just a little confused because I am used to the PIC where in order to downgrade to a lower PIC with the compiler I just use a different #include header.  Obviously I still have to redefine pin names and make sure it has all the same hardware necessary to run my code, but that is about the only overhead.

    I think I am just going to stick with the Cortex M series like I originally planned and you suggested.  Then maybe next year get another dev board with more of an embedded RTOS type system in mind.  I just was hoping to kill 2 birds with one stone.  I just don't think I can meet the requirement of low cost chips.  The TI Stellaris series has chips from about $3-5 up to $10 and most of the things I use them for are microcontroller based products.  Having the embedded operating system will be overkill 90% of the time.  It just looks like so much fun though, haha!  But I really need to be able to buy price comparable chips when it comes time for my ideas to hit the production line.  I can't afford to put $40 microprocessors in hardware that can run on $5 controllers.


    -Zack-
  • Arm Employee Badge
    Note: This was originally posted on 27th January 2012 at http://forums.arm.com

    For parts which are a step up from a PIC, the Cortex-M3 sounds like the right option, although typically RAM and Flash is limited so running some flavour of Linux directly is likely to be difficult. For getting started take a look at:


    http://mbed.org/

    This is a rapid prototyping board based on the Cortex-M family - it's pin compatible with breadboard, and comes with a web-based compiler, and programs you compile just download over USB. It's great for hacking about to get a feel for what the platforms are capable of.

    In terms of architecture and code portability between a Cortex-A and a Cortex-M you have a little work to do. The Cortex-M family is a little different to other ARM cores in terms of how the interrupts are managed, and in the Cortex-A family you have the added complications of cache and MMU handling, which you won't have in the Cortex-M. So system code is not 100% portable between the two.

    For the generic "application code", as you say C is C, and the compiler can do the hard work ;)

    Cheers,
    Iso