2016-06-12

An ARM experience

Well... we're back at writing.
Two years ago NXP lauched a 8pin dip ARM with 4K FLASH and 1K RAM, lots of people started doing things with it, as most other ARM processors (even Cortex M0) are multi-leaded-smd-monsters. This one, on the other side, looks like an ATTiny85 in its PDIP8.
This weekend decided to try it out. I just followed the herd, although not the common route. I followed this tutorial and bought this "starter kit".
I used one LED and the two switches that come in the bundle to wire one LED output as the example and one switch for the RESET and the other to force the bootloader.

I used two machines for the LPCXpresso installation (you do have to register to get a free non limiting license, but if you can't be bothered for this processor you don't need to). You will need to install some extra packages, follow the procedure in this link. I managed to have LPCXpresso running both in OpenSuse 13.2 and Leap 42. In Leap you need to install the 32bit packages instead of the x64. Download the LPC810 Codebase example from here, import the project and build all. No joke, it is that simple.
Since I'm running linux, the alternative loader is this one. Like most linux command line programs, it is crude and simple. Just download, extract and type make.
Just copy the example command line with the your hex program (it is in the Release directory in the workspace project folder).
and yes... it blinks!
The processor has lots of embedded resources but only 4k of code might be the limiting factor. Still it is very interesting, in particular if you can save more power than an ATTiny and when needed produce way more MIPS.
For a first post after such a long hiatus it was not bad... more to come :-)