Stellaris LM4F120 LaunchPad Evaluation Board or the best 13 bucks you ever spent!

What in the world do you get for $12.99?? You get this cool 80Mhz 32 bit ARM Cortex M4F Launchpad Board!

So lets take a look at this thing. Well for openers we get both 16/32 bit instruction, and the F stands for Floating Point. It comes with its own on-board USB In-Circuit Debugger. On-board I/O is USB,  CAN, SPI, PWM,  ADC. 16 MHz main xtal oscillator, 33MHz Real-Time Clock xtal. And plenty of memory: 256KB of 40Mhz Flash, 2KB of EEPROM, 24KB SSRAM, an MPU.

TI has provided a great Student Guide and Lab Manual. I went to TI training it cost me $25.00 and I got my kit plus the Ken Tec QVGA TFT display with a resistive touch overlay.  With this I can model my CDU with out any of my hardware. I also found a nice App Note on using this board as a I/O processor (shows you how to hook up a PS2 keyboard). I looks like I can put my code that’s in my Linux box into the Stellaris board, but at this time im not shure of my code size as yet.  I have only been messing about with this for a month. But I have been busy moving 😦

Now for what do you use for the IDE? Nope we can use Code Composer 5 (Eclipse) and the licence is forever as long as you have the board plugged in. No you can remove it and put in a different one.