I have been working on an IMU related project and i initially started out with a good old AVR controller(i like them, and use them alot).
A decision was made to change the controller and use an LPC2103 instead(it was out of my hands).
The Coridium ArmexpressLITE thingie from SFE was used, but it has been a mixed experience working with it. :?
Using the coridium software sure makes it easy to get started with simple stuff but it can be problem if i wanna do something that is not covered by their prewritten functions.
The documentration they provide is kinda…limited …and their webpage contains very little information that isnt in the general help file.
The biggest problem by far has been getting the I2C and SPI functions to work. I have had alot of problems interfacing 3 sensors(MLX90609(SPI), ADXL345(SPI) and HMC5842(I2C)) and i have gone through everything several times…:
The MLX is working “adequatly”
The ADXL was acting total wierd and sporadic(i switcted to the MMA-something from freescale)
the HMC i’ve only worked with for a few hours but i have yet to get anything out of it at all…
I guess i just dont trust those built-in functions. Its a bit too late starting from scratch so i just wanted to hear other peoples experiences on this product. Espcially when interfacing digital sensors with SPI/I2C…
I have done searches here on the forum but with few useful topics. There seems to be very few users of this particular product on the net, and the official webpage has no forum of any kind(that i could find)…
All the information you need on the LPC2103 peripherals is in the user manual. Have you downloaded it? If you need help with them you should join my LPC2000 Yahoo group.
yeah, i have been looking in that manual(i just joined the yahoo group too).
its just that, I would like to use those prewritten coridium functions of I2CIN and I2COUT, instead of writing a new communication library from scratch :? …
With Coridium’s boards, you can use either WinAVR (GCC) or any other ARM compiler suite, or Coridium’s BASIC. I found that BASIC suitable only for small quick experiments with very simple I/O. YMMV
I don’t think any of the Coridium boards can support JTAG.
We actually use an Armite at work. I didn’t realize a forum was available - I’ll have to check that out. Thanks for the tip!
One quirk about the (soft) I2C function calls. For the sda_pin and scl_pin arguments, you don’t use an IC pin or a port - you use the I/O pin / terminal number from the Armite board itself. It took a while to figure that out.
Somewhere in the manual they mention that their implementation does not support clock stretching. Ours works fine reading and writing EEPROMS. Not too surprisingly, I had no luck trying to talk to one of our boxes that uses its own flavor of soft-I2C.
If you try to stretch the Armite very far you’re in for nothing but frustration. But I still think it is a good (cheap) intro into the ARM market because it just works, right out of the box. (I didn’t try the Basic.)
Yes, the owners/developers support their Yahoo forum VERY WELL.
The user audience is kinda small, so contributed sw is limited.
The sw is ok, I use their C compiler/ide with no problems. My problem is they are too expensive in the field, I found other 2103 devices cheaper. Their hook is the basic sw.
motopic:
Yes, the owners/developers support their Yahoo forum VERY WELL.
The user audience is kinda small, so contributed sw is limited.
That is not necessarily a bad thing - the existence of excellent support is what really matters. The value of this is priceless.
Unfortunately quantity is often inversely proportional to quality. The quality of much of the publicly available unsupported software for these sorts of processors renders it next to useless
The sw is ok, I use their C compiler/ide with no problems. My problem is they are too expensive in the field, I found other 2103 devices cheaper. Their hook is the basic sw.
Assuming professional software development at typical salaries is involved, you would have to be buying one heck of a lot of 2103 devices to make up for the cost of lost productivity from using poor quality examples and problematic development systems.
