In recent weeks I've put some effort into working with a Beagleboard running Angstom Linux. The Beagleboard has an OMAP3530 processor, a ridiculously over-powered thing. It's cool to be running Linux on something you can attack with a soldering iron. But as I looked at my intended application and the price of the Beagleboard, and the hoops they jump through to manufacture the Beagleboard, I started to wonder if more conventional weapons might be sufficient to win the day.
I'd blogged in the past about the AT91SAM7, another family of ARM-based chips that are a little less over-powered, so I wondered, would they work for this? My first thought was to use Angstrom Linux on the SAM7. I found that nobody had done it, and digging deeper to find out why they hadn't, I was reminded that Linux requires a MMU and the SAM7 doesn't have one. Neither of these was a surprising piece of information, and I was probably dimly aware of both, but had never consciously connected them.
The reason Linux needs an MMU is because it runs multiple processes in separate memory spaces, so that one process can't crash another by overwriting its memory. This requires remapping from virtual memory addresses to physical addresses. That's most of what an MMU does.
It's shameful to admit, but I had unthinkingly assumed that 32-bit processors would necessarily run something like Linux, merely by virtue of being 32-bit processors. This was the result of having grown up with 8-bit processors and thinking of 32-bit processors as "big" and "complicated" and a little "scary". They are in fact all those things, but we still need to keep our wits in their presence.
Casting about for an operating system that might be more SAM7-friendly, I came across FreeRTOS. I started puttering around with a FreeRTOS port for the SAM7, and after banging on that a while it crossed my mind to think that there might be some other ARM7 chip for which a FreeRTOS port already existed so I wouldn't have to do the port myself. A little investigation in this direction led me to the LPC1768 (overview, datasheet, user's manual, Digikey listing) an inexpensive ARM7 chip with lots of flash and RAM, an Ethernet controller, USB controllers for both host mode and device mode, buckets and buckets of GPIO pins, and a comfortably higher number of MIPS than the SAM7 family. The LPC1768 has an ARM Cortex M3 core (overview, user's guide).
So what are our hardware development options here? Sparkfun provides a nice little board for only $50. It has tons of pins, sanely spaced at 0.1", and a JTAG connector on one end and a mini-USB on the other. It does require a power supply but that's not unreasonable. It has two pushbuttons (one a reset) and an LED. While I heartily encourage anybody to buy this board, I ended up buying a different board (which, time will tell, I may regret) because it was available on eBay.
I'm hoping to see the board in about a week, and I'll try to get FreeRTOS running on it with reasonable haste. Hopefully it will all work out nicely and I'll get to do a lot of blogging about it. The LPC1768 is really an interesting chip with a lot of on-chip peripherals, and I'd expect that would be a good amount of fun.
I'd blogged in the past about the AT91SAM7, another family of ARM-based chips that are a little less over-powered, so I wondered, would they work for this? My first thought was to use Angstrom Linux on the SAM7. I found that nobody had done it, and digging deeper to find out why they hadn't, I was reminded that Linux requires a MMU and the SAM7 doesn't have one. Neither of these was a surprising piece of information, and I was probably dimly aware of both, but had never consciously connected them.
The reason Linux needs an MMU is because it runs multiple processes in separate memory spaces, so that one process can't crash another by overwriting its memory. This requires remapping from virtual memory addresses to physical addresses. That's most of what an MMU does.
It's shameful to admit, but I had unthinkingly assumed that 32-bit processors would necessarily run something like Linux, merely by virtue of being 32-bit processors. This was the result of having grown up with 8-bit processors and thinking of 32-bit processors as "big" and "complicated" and a little "scary". They are in fact all those things, but we still need to keep our wits in their presence.
Casting about for an operating system that might be more SAM7-friendly, I came across FreeRTOS. I started puttering around with a FreeRTOS port for the SAM7, and after banging on that a while it crossed my mind to think that there might be some other ARM7 chip for which a FreeRTOS port already existed so I wouldn't have to do the port myself. A little investigation in this direction led me to the LPC1768 (overview, datasheet, user's manual, Digikey listing) an inexpensive ARM7 chip with lots of flash and RAM, an Ethernet controller, USB controllers for both host mode and device mode, buckets and buckets of GPIO pins, and a comfortably higher number of MIPS than the SAM7 family. The LPC1768 has an ARM Cortex M3 core (overview, user's guide).
So what are our hardware development options here? Sparkfun provides a nice little board for only $50. It has tons of pins, sanely spaced at 0.1", and a JTAG connector on one end and a mini-USB on the other. It does require a power supply but that's not unreasonable. It has two pushbuttons (one a reset) and an LED. While I heartily encourage anybody to buy this board, I ended up buying a different board (which, time will tell, I may regret) because it was available on eBay.
I'm hoping to see the board in about a week, and I'll try to get FreeRTOS running on it with reasonable haste. Hopefully it will all work out nicely and I'll get to do a lot of blogging about it. The LPC1768 is really an interesting chip with a lot of on-chip peripherals, and I'd expect that would be a good amount of fun.
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