LM3S8962 Unboxing

It’s been a while since I started telling myself that I had to try the 32bit microcontrollers at some point… the 8bit AtMega and others similar to Arduino are nice and more than enough most of the time, but you can’ t do any proper multi-threading on them.

The occasion came unexpectedly when a friend told me they were using an ARM 32 bit cortex M3 for one of their devices and I immediately said that I needed to hack it… 🙂

Getting an evaluation board for free (they are not hugely expensive, but it feels wrong to pay for something I’m not sure I’ll ever use for real…) was the harder part with Texas Instruments support being quite nice and helpful (even calling back) but unable to send me one.

I finally got my hands on one board a few weeks ago, when the aforementionned friend sent me one of the 2 he has.

So without further due, here’s the “beast” :

LM3S8962 in its original box

LM3S8962 the content of the box

This is not like an Arduino board, where int 30 minutes after receiving it, you have your first “Hello World” example up and running… or at leas not for me… It took me more than 1 hour just to install the IAR IDE / compiler that comes with it, and to be honest, I’m still at a loss as to WHERE to start from ! 🙂

So here’s the board powered up, running the default program :

LM3S8962 plugged in and running the default program

More to come, as I manage to find my way around it…