BeagleBone Design Contest

Design a new plug-in board for the BeagleBone CapeContest to win $1000 and production by Circuitco.  The contest deadline is December 31, 2012, with the top three winning the Grand Prize which includes the above plus an analyzer from Total Phase.  Entry requirements are a schematic, bill of materials and YouTube video describing the cape.  Weekly prizes are also be available including Total Phase tools, Adafruit ProtoCapes, and MetaWatches from Mouser.  There are already two submissions, a Geiger cape and a CollRunner-II CPLD cape, you can see them here.

Atmel Launches Family of Power Efficient ARM Microcontrollers

Atmel SAM4L processors target designs that need both performance and low power usage.  An evaluation kit is available for $149 at the Atmel store with an integrated power meter.

This family uses the ARM Cortex-M4 processor which has the highest performance in the Cortex-M family and includes control and signal processing capabilities.  For pricing and availability see this Atmel press release.

SAM4L-EK: Overview

The SAM4L-EK evaluation kit features an ATSAM4LC4C with 256K flash and 48MHz max clock frequency.  The kit includes an on-board Segger J-Link, capacative touch area, USB device connector, light sensor, audio jack, segmented LCD, a wireless interface header and an add-on board header for Atmel Sensors Xplained boards.  A unique feature of this board is the real-time power monitoring section with OLED color display.

New Low-Power ARM Processors Available from Freescale

Cortex-M0+ processors and $12.95 development platform are now in stock at Mouser  The Cortex-M0+ is the most energy efficient ARM processor and is currently only available in the Freescale Kinetis L series MCU family.  Currently available are a KL25 with USB and a KL15, both with 128KB program memory, 16KB data RAM, and 48MHz clock frequency.

The FRDM-KL25Z Freescale Freedom Development Platform is also available at other distributors including DigiKey.  It includes a Capacitive touch slider, accelerometer, tri-color LED, OpenSDA USB to serial debug interface, and an open-source data logging application.  See the video below for more information.

Introducing the Freescale Freedom Development Platform FRDM-KL25Z

New Low Cost Lattice FPGA Kits

For $19 you can buy a high performance or low power iCE40 family evaluation kit with free iCEcube2 development tool support.

The iCEblink40-HX1K Evaluation Kit is the high-performance platform with a iCE40HX1K FPGA.  The board is USB powered and programmable.  An onboard Atmel 90USB162 8-bit microcontroller allows two-way communication with the FPGA.

The iCEblink40-LP1K Evaluation Kit is contains a low-power and small footprint iCE40LP1K FPGA.  It also contains the Atmel 90USB162 for communication.

Both iCEblink40 kits feature 1280 tables, on-chip RAM, 1Mbit SPI flash and capacitive buttons.  The low price lasts until October 31, 2012.

Lattice is also reducing the price of the MachXO2 Pico Development Kit to $29 until the end of the year.  This kit allows you to test popular serial interfaces using the LatticeMico8 open, free 8-bit soft microcontroller, it also features a segmented LCD, 4 capacitive buttons, SPI Flash, I2C temperature sensor and power measurement.

New TI ARM Starter Kit Includes Display

Texas Instruments' new AM335x Starter Kit is now available for $199 featuring a 720MHz AM3358 ARM processor, 4.3 inch touch-screen/LCD, and dual-gigabit Ethernet with integrated switch.  This processor is in the same family as the Beaglebone's AM3359, so it should be easy to port software that is available for that popular platform.  TI already has Linux and Android software development kits for the 3.x kernel and ice cream sandwich respectively.  Here is a list of features from the starter kit's product page:

• AM3358, 720Mhz
• 256MB DDR3
• 4.3” Touch screen LCD
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet Ports with integrated switch
• WiFi WL1271 with Wifi Direct Support’
• Bluetooth®
• USB-UART
• USB-XDS100 emulator
• Android navigation buttons
• User configured LEDs
• Audio Out

UPDATE: There is now an AM335x Starter Kit Page on the Texas Instruments Wiki  for developers with software and development tool downloads and design files.

You can purchase from the TI e-store, Avnet, DigiKey or Mouser, all have it in stock at the time of writing.  The part number is TMDSSK3358.

Introducing the Sitara AM335x Starter Kit

Summer Development Board Deals

Discounts on ARM, DSP and PLD boards are available from TI and Lattice.  Texas Instruments new LCDK boards are 20% off until the end of August from the TI estore.  One model is a multicore ARM+DSP, and the other has only the DSP.  See my LCDK post for more details.  For PLD development, the MachXO2 Pico Development Kit from Lattice Semiconductor is now only $29.

Low Cost TI Floating-Point MCU Board

The new $17 LaunchPad has a more powerful Piccolo floating-point processor than the popular MSP430 Launchpad series.  The kit includes on-board XDS100 JTAG for debug and programming with the included USB cable and a free version of Code Composer Studio v5 to develop and program code.  There is also a new LED Boosterpack compatible with the system for $30.  Both are available from the TI eStore.  More information available in this press release and the youtube video shown below.

Free 3D Design Software

Autodesk 123D allows you to design and create 3D objects with apps that run on a PC, iPad, or online.  The 123D family of products are aimed at the personal fabrication market. You may be familiar with Autodesk from it's popular AutoCAD products or from Instructables.com.

Another free 3D program is SketchUp. With SketchUp, it's possible to build 3D models of printed circuit boards using CadSoft Eagle files, using the EagleUp script and ImageMagick.  Google recently sold SketchUp to Trimble who plan on continuing to offer it for free.

Instructables Electronics Tips and Tricks Contest

Win an Instek bench or Nano handheld Oscilloscope by submitting a new electronics instructable by August 20, 2012.

Google Reimagines the Development Board

The ADK 2012 platform is packed with innovation and usable code for Android accessory development.



They advertise that all of the code is open source and with a less restrictive license like BSD so you can include it in your products. Here are the main libraries:

• Bluetooth stack (BSD license) with libraries for RFCOMM, A2DP,L2CAP, SDP
• Multimedia library including an ogg player
• MicroSD SD/SDHC driver with FAT12/RAT16/FAT32
• USB Host stack with Android open accessory protocol implementation

All of this runs on the Atmel SAM3X ARM Cortex-M3 processor with 512kB flash, 100kB RAM, and bluetooth is provide by a Texas Instruments CC2564. There are also sensors for light, proximity, acceleration, magnetism, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and other toys like a capacitive slider and buttons, RGB LEDs including the 7 segment display, a transducer speaker, and an NFC tag.

For more info, here is the developer's guide from google Accesory Development Kit 2012 Guide. A little more info about the Arduino IDE (for an ARM processor) it uses on the Arduino blog.

The surprise at the end of the video is that an ADK 2012 was given to each attendee of this talk, and the device is not for sale (yet). If you really want one, try e-bay, currently the best price is an auction at $400 US. If are lucky enough to have one here is the Android app from google play.