Texas Instruments Stellaris LaunchPad - LXAF120H (UPDATED)
You're looking at my latest digital gizmo, an ARM-based Stellaris LaunchPad development board . At the heart of the board is an LX ARM Cortex-M4 32-bit CPU running at a modest (by today's standards) 80MHz. It comes along with 256K of FLASH and 32KB of SRAM. It won't run Linux or Android or any other major operating system, but for writing executives, interrupt handlers and I/O manipulators in C or assembler down at the bare silicon, it has more than enough raw computational power. I started my professional life nearly 40 years ago by building embedded systems with the 8-bit MOS Technologies 6502 and Zilog Z80. In both those instances the embedded systems had a lot less RAM and EPROM and I was very glad to have them running at a then-blistering 1 to 4MHz. The also comes along with a lot of hardware-based timers and very flexible I/O pins. It is, for an old hacker like me, something of a dream come true. And I got it all for free from an old friend who had in turn g...