Electronics Education System

TonyKramer · April 16, 2017

So I'm working on a bit of an expansive project. Basically it boils down to being an electronics education system with both an ARM9 and ARM M0+ in it. Do you all think I should have such a complicated ARM9 chip (it will be driving a LCD and other very basic tasks) or is there another option that would be less expensive and easier to accomplish. I could just have the ARM9 be on a separate board that could be plugged into a motherboard, but I just don't know right now.

Ahaber · April 18, 2017

I am not really sure what you are trying to create here. What part of electronics education are you trying to teach? Logic? Programming? Circuit Theory? Basically I don't really understand what you are trying to create, but it sounds interesting. Also how is this different from something "off the shelf" like a raspberry pi or arduino.

bob345 · April 18, 2017

Sounds like what you want could easily be achieved with something like an arduino.

TonyKramer · April 19, 2017

6 hours ago, bob345 said:

Sounds like what you want could easily be achieved with something like an arduino.

If it could, I wouldn't be wasting my time. An ARM9 is vastly more powerful (and complicated ) than an AVR. I'm working with it as a host processor for many different tasks.

cameroncoats · May 9, 2017

On 16/04/2017 at 6:15 PM, TonyKramer said:

So I'm working on a bit of an expansive project. Basically it boils down to being an electronics education system with both an ARM9 and ARM M0+ in it. Do you all think I should have such a complicated ARM9 chip (it will be driving a LCD and other very basic tasks) or is there another option that would be less expensive and easier to accomplish. I could just have the ARM9 be on a separate board that could be plugged into a motherboard, but I just don't know right now.

Having just done something similar, your options very much depend on whether BGAs are viable or you need to stick to more forgiving packages.

If you can use BGAs, look at TI-AM335x series as used on the beaglebone - there's extensive documentation and software because of the beaglebone and they're around $10-15 in quantity (Cortex-A8 though). They have a build in LCD controller and some models have what TI call PRU - a pair of RISC cores that might be able to replace your M0+.

If BGAs are prohibitive, look at the raspberry pi compute module - you will not be able to beat it on price or performance for low to medium quantities.

If neither of these suit bear in mind there's a large market for ARM modules sold as CoM or SoM; computer/system on module, these are quite expensive compared to the bare processor but typically include power management, RAM and a few peripherals and are the sensible option for quantities below and approaching 1k units because of the NRE savings.