I need to put together one to a few quick prototypes of an
Ethernet-connected system, and the customer is concerned to minimize
the materials cost of his prototype(s). The requirement is for enough
flash and RAM to run a TCP/IP stack and download a small HTML file via
http. Board must have both a serial port and a Centronics port to
connect to one of two different printers, but I can hack both of those
on with external hardware of course.

The cheapest retailed EVB I can see is Olimex's MSP430F149 board with
10bT Ethernet at $69.95. This price is acceptable (though RAM is a bit
tight - I will have to add external SPI EEPROM to store the downloaded
file), but I'd like to hear alternatives if they exist.

Particularly something with more RAM (8K would be nice). MSP430, ARM or
AVR preferably. What I really want is a stripped down version of one of
Olimex's ST or Philips-based ARM boards. I _JUST_ want the Ethernet and
the micro, nothing else

larwe wrote:
Oops, please ignore the subject line. I started thinking one thing then
started typing another

"larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1157981125.184085.275680@i3g2000cwc.googlegro ups.com...
Would one of the low-end Rabbits (e.g. RCM2200) not do? Seems to meet all
your requirements in terms of Ethernet and TCP/IP, I/O, serial port, RAM
(battery-backed), and cost.

http://www.rabbitsemiconductor.com/products/rcm2200/

Steve
http://www.fivetrees.com

Steve at fivetrees wrote:

Hmm. I'll take a look at it, but I suspect this would be a bad choice -
I'd never go to production with Rabbit, and their baroque development
environment would mean an irritating porting effort to the real
hardware.

"larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1157981125.184085.275680@i3g2000cwc.googlegro ups.com...
Fred Eady's got a bunch of embedded ethernet modules at http://www.edtp.com/

Cheers,
Alf

larwe wrote:
cheapest one is the first good one you find.

If you're not charging to find one (why?), but are charging for the time
it takes you to make it work, the cheapest one is the one with the most
generous set of resources and demonstration software.

Unless you're talking a "prototype" run of 500 or so.

But you knew that, so I assume the directive is coming from your client...

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

"larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1157982882.300787.181330@d34g2000cwd.googlegr oups.com...
Production != "a few quick prototypes" .

It's not really that bad. I've just done a small production run with the
2200; I managed to find a way of organising my files such that they were
pretty close to ANSI C. (I needed to be able to port the whole thing on to a
different platform later too.) I found some aspects irritating, sure, but I
confess I've developed a grudging respect for both the hardware and the
software environment.

Steve
http://www.fivetrees.com

larwe wrote:
<http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/items2.php?c=h8kit&s=popularity&p=1&r=1&page=#K-00209>

Can even run Linux (albeit barely - too little memory)
<http://sourceforge.jp/projects/uclinux-h8>

--
@jhol

http://iki.fi/jhol/decss.html

These are only $30:

http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/publ...n/CP2201EK.htm

Eric wrote:
permit a user to demonstrate several preconfigured applications..."

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

"larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1157981125.184085.275680@i3g2000cwc.googlegro ups.com...
Good choice, but remove the 149 device and replace with the 1611 .. 10KB RAM
and DMA

"larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1157981125.184085.275680@i3g2000cwc.googlegro ups.com...
Take a look at TINI (From MAXIM). I found it to be a great
network platform. iButton makes for great human interface.
They can be programmed in Java as well.

http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2...._pk/3743/ln/en

Sandeep
http://www.niktech.com

larwe a écrit :
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/...68636K1007596#

Bugman wrote:
If you are looking at Freescale, you'd be much better off with the
MCF5223x family now rather than the MC9S12NE64. You get a much more
powerful 32-bit ColdFire cpu, with more memory and better development
tools, for a similar price and with the same convenience of having the
MAC and PHY built into the device. From the Freescale website, I could
only see fairly large and expensive development cards - a minimal board
with the device should be no more than about a square inch area.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/...H3YTLC00M98090

David Brown wrote:
is 300$.

Bugman wrote:
Exactly - the Coldfire device is a much better choice of chip, but the
Freescale cheap demo board is not available yet. There might well be
other boards available with these devices, however - I've only looked at
the Freescale page.

I guess it also depends on how much the customer is determined to use
the lowest price demo cards regardless of the devices on the card, and
how much they want to use a card with a device that would be realistic
for production systems.

Tim Wescott wrote:
That's odd!

Try this one. The only problem here is that they're not in stock. These
use a powerful Arm chip and it costs $70.

http://www.embeddedartists.com/produ...pc2138_eth.php


Or, you can use a real nice dev board with a color LCD for only $116
(using a very sweet Atmel Arm chip that can also do USB):

http://www.olimex.com/dev/sam7-ex256.html

I knew of a place that had a smaller board based on the SAM7X, but I
can't remember which company that was.