SparkFun Electronics Forum

I've been looking for a answer to this for a while now, may be you guys can help me out with this...

I have years of experience with PIC microcontrollers, Arduino etc. I am looking to get started with ARM architecture now. I need suggestions on which product to start with? Given the following considerations

1. Popularity and getting started resources on the internet
2. Possibility of scaling up or down within the family or manufacturer ( example PIC family) depending on the application
3. Peripheral feature set
4. Ease of use

I know this is probably not the simplest of questions to answer but would like your suggestions. Thanks.

I would recommend the LPCXpresso and mbed products to a newcomer. Both are based on the NXP ARM Cortex-M range of microcontrollers.

Thanks Chris, i'll start looking at that.

I would suggest looking at ARM's mbed.org site. Many of the dev boards on this site use the Arduino Shield as a peripheral interface so it is pretty easy to put something together. The dev boards are pretty low cost also. They also supply a on-line compiler and libraries for many boards.

falingtrea wrote:I would suggest looking at ARM's mbed.org site. Many of the dev boards on this site use the Arduino Shield as a peripheral interface so it is pretty easy to put something together. The dev boards are pretty low cost also. They also supply a on-line compiler and libraries for many boards.

thanks for that...looks very promising.

enggricha wrote:I've been looking for a answer to this for a while now, may be you guys can help me out with this...

I have years of experience with PIC microcontrollers, Arduino etc. I am looking to get started with ARM architecture now. I need suggestions on which product to start with? Given the following considerations

1. Popularity and getting started resources on the internet
2. Possibility of scaling up or down within the family or manufacturer ( example PIC family) depending on the application
3. Peripheral feature set
4. Ease of use

I know this is probably not the simplest of questions to answer but would like your suggestions. Thanks.

These Teensy 3.1. Excellent libraries, forum.
Sold also here at SFE.
http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html

stevech wrote:
These Teensy 3.1. Excellent libraries, forum.
Sold also here at SFE.
http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html

This was useful thanks.

For Eclipse base multi-platform ARM development, have a look at this blog site. Many pages supports nRF51, LPC series and more.

http://embeddedsoftdev.blogspot.ca/p/h.html

Either Teensy 3.1 due to it's active following and large library for hobbyists/students, or STM32F4xx for more serious work using ST-Link. On Teensy 3.1, look to at using MS Visual Studio Community (free) with the Visual Micro plug-in. Excellent IDE. Far easier/better than Eclipse, IMO.
I used to be an NXP fan, but I much prefer ST now, and the CMSIS/HAL LIbraries from ST.

Take a look at the Freedom dev boards from FreeScale. They sell for just US$12.95 (for a complete hardware/software toolchain) and have a CortexM0+/M4 and 16-bit ADCs and 6/12-bit DACs. Also included is a built-in debugger/programmer and connectors for Arduino compatible shields as well as being mBed compatible.
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/sit ... FRDM-KL25Z



Comes with the Kinetis Design Studio IDE which is a FREE integrated development environment for Kinetis MCUs that enables robust editing, compiling and debugging of your designs. Based on free, open-source software including Eclipse, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Debugger (GDB), and others, the Kinetis Design Studio IDE offers designers a simple development tool. Furthermore, Processor Expert software enables your design with its knowledge base and helps create powerful applications with a few mouse clicks.

Languages supported: Assembly, C and C++ (all with no code size restrictions).

enggricha wrote:I've been looking for a answer to this for a while now, may be you guys can help me out with this...

I have years of experience with PIC microcontrollers, Arduino etc. I am looking to get started with ARM architecture now. I need suggestions on which product to start with? Given the following considerations

1. Popularity and getting started resources on the internet
2. Possibility of scaling up or down within the family or manufacturer ( example PIC family) depending on the application
3. Peripheral feature set
4. Ease of use

I know this is probably not the simplest of questions to answer but would like your suggestions. Thanks.

Did you look at these
http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html
(and there's a lower cost one in march - under $12)
and the forum
https://forum.pjrc.com/