Post : Developing with eBay-sourced ARM + LCD dev boards
URL : http://hackaday.com/2012/11/07/developing-with-ebay-sourced-arm-lcd-dev-boards/
Posted : November 7, 2012 at 6:00 am
Author : Brian Benchoff
Tags : arm, dev board, lcd, stm32, tft, touch screen
Categories : ARM

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/tft.jpg

eBay isn't only about counterfeit designer handbags and boxes of all-marshmallow Lucky Charms, sometimes there's actually something useful for sale. [Matt] found a bunch of Chinese-made ARM development boards with integrated LCD displays on the 'bay, but without a reliable toolchain, these boards - as cool as they are - are nearly useless. Thankfully, he figured out how to do something with these boards (http://zizzle-brewbot.blogspot.com/2012/10/stm32-lcd-touch-screen-demo.html) , and neatly packaged everything into a VirtualBox image.

The boards in question usually include a 2.4" or 3.2" touch panel LCD, an STM32F103 ARM Cortex-M3 CPU, a microSD card connector, and sometimes a few other goodies like 16MB of Flash memory and an RS-232 port. An amazing amount of computational capability packaged into an easy-to-use form factor made even more awesome by their $40 price point.

Because these boards offer so much more than a common Arduino, a proper OS is in order. [Matt] looked over FreeRTOS (http://www.freertos.org/implementation/a00002.html) and included a few demo programs for his Ubuntu-based VirtualBox image (available for download on [Matt]'s site, it's a dropbox, email us if you need some hosting, [Matt]).

Programming these boards can be done over a serial interface, but a JTAG programmer such as a Bus Blaster (http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Blaster) makes things very, very easy.

You can check out a few demos [Matt] put together after the break. It's a very cool development that is much more suited for being integrated into an electronics project than a Raspberry Pi or other such high-power ARM board, and something we hope to see more of in the future.

Read more of this post (http://hackaday.com/2012/11/07/developing-with-ebay-sourced-arm-lcd-dev-boards/#more-89672)

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