The idea of starting out with the 8-DIP LPC810 ARM µC occurred to me not very long ago, when I discovered a simple upload mechanism based on the modified FTDI interface. It’s quite an intriguing idea that you can put some pretty advanced decision and timing logic into such a small chip and do so entirely through free open source tools, with all the details fully exposed.
Making an LPC810 do stuff feels like creating our own custom chips: we can upload any software of our own design into the chip, then place it in a project as “control centre” to do fun stuff. Protocol decoders / encoders / converters, LED drivers (e.g. the WS2812 “neopixel”), even a small interpreter or a wireless radio driver, these are all feasible – despite having just 4 KB of flash memory.
Small programmable chips such as the LPC810 demand a relentless drive for simplicity, which is an excellent skill to develop IMO – for whatever physical computing projects you may have in mind.
Anyway. The hardware side is now completely done, with something like this ready to go:
Unfortunately, that’s only half of the story. We still need to address uploads + compilation.
Check out the next set of articles, to be published from Wednesday through Saturday:
With this out of the way, we can make an LED blink or fade. Trivial stuff, but note that we’re setting up the infrastructure for embedded software development on ARM chips.
Oh, and if this is too basic for you, see if you can figure out this JeePuzzle… any takers?
(For comments, check the forum area)