Hey all. I’ve asked this question many places, so why not SFE?
I need something a bigger than an AVR or PIC so of course I think ARM. The main requirements are: Tiny and low-power for a battery application which needs runtime in days, USB Host mode x1 minimum, graphical color LCD, ~12 GPIOs and if possible a few analogs (but not important.) The rest is cake. I only need 1 or 2, this will never be mass produced.
The problem being, most dev boards/kits are extreme overkill and very expensive. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to use a nice Olimex or Embest AT91 SAM SBC board with a 4.3" touchscreen and run a real os like Ångström or Android, but the cost for these things can be more than an off-the-shelf mass produced ARM palmie or ARM/Atom/etc. netbook, with case / keyboard / battery / charger. (minus the GPIOs without some hacking or UART-attached µC to handle them). Or even a mini-ITX x86 setup. The only drawback is having to use multiple expensive Li-cell packs in parallel to meet the runtime requirements.
Currently, I’m leaning towards the $110 few-years-old FriendlyARM Samsung S3C2240 ARM9 Board with a resistive touch 3.5" TFT running QTopia linux.
I can comb over all the sites we all frequent for this stuff and still never find the dev board that’s perfect for this, so any suggestions you guys have greatly appreciated and will be fully investigated.
analog:
Hey all. I’ve asked this question many places, so why not SFE?
I need something a bigger than an AVR or PIC so of course I think ARM. The main requirements are: Tiny and low-power for a battery application which needs runtime in days, USB Host mode x1 minimum, graphical color LCD, ~12 GPIOs and if possible a few analogs (but not important.) The rest is cake. I only need 1 or 2, this will never be mass produced.
The problem being, most dev boards/kits are extreme overkill and very expensive. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to use a nice Olimex or Embest AT91 SAM SBC board with a 4.3" touchscreen and run a real os like Ångström or Android, but the cost for these things can be more than an off-the-shelf mass produced ARM palmie or ARM/Atom/etc. netbook, with case / keyboard / battery / charger. (minus the GPIOs without some hacking or UART-attached µC to handle them). Or even a mini-ITX x86 setup. The only drawback is having to use multiple expensive Li-cell packs in parallel to meet the runtime requirements.
Currently, I’m leaning towards the $110 few-years-old FriendlyARM Samsung S3C2240 ARM9 Board with a resistive touch 3.5" TFT running QTopia linux.
I can comb over all the sites we all frequent for this stuff and still never find the dev board that’s perfect for this, so any suggestions you guys have greatly appreciated and will be fully investigated.
Thanks for reading!
ARM9 is normally used if you want to run Linux or some such.
I at this moment am working with the OK6410 with 4.3" LCD from http://www.arm9board.net, it’s quit a nice device with low price, $139 with 4.3" LCD touch screen included, and I guess it meets what you need, check it out.