Texas Instruments has sponsored the following story
For those of you not old enough to remember, there was a time when circuits were designed and prototyped on boards meant for slicing bread. Hence the name breadboard. That was also around the time when a design engineer could place an oscilloscope probe on any circuit node to see what was going on with its operation.
It couldn't last.
Three big trends have driven the design process since then: integration, miniaturization and net-work based systems. In this march towards complexity, the design engineer has thankfully been assisted by a whole new type of development tool - the developers' kit. Combining simulation and instrumentation techniques, they have evolved into such products as the Texas Instruments LaunchPad Development Ecosystem.
A youngster confronts the LaunchPad
Ecosystem at a re-cent science fair.
TI's LaunchPads are micro-controller development kits available in a variety of models to ad-dress various project needs, including the hardware, software and community of components that make LaunchPad a complete development system.
The TM4C129 LaunchPad evaluation kit is based on theTM4C129x MCU product. With an ARM Cortex-M4, integrated Ethernet MAC+PHY, security features and flexible set of I/O, it's a prom-ising processor for building connected products such as an Internet-Of-Things sensor hub.
There is a large array of compatible products from TI that are meant to be building blocks of IoT systems. The latest offering, the FR5969 is the lowest power MCU, to be used where low power and standby operation capabilities are key. It features an integrated 64 kB ferroelectric RAM for fast, non-volatile memory accesses, and improved peripheral integration including a 12-bit dif-ferential SAR analog-to-digital converter. As with most TI LaunchPads, it includes Energia de-velopment software support. It also includes connectivity to BoosterPacks, plug-ins that expand the capability of the LaunchPads.
FRAM technology is particularly noteworthy for providing similar functionality as flash memory. Its advantages include lower power consumption and higher write speed. There was at one time a cost and capacity tradeoff, but as this product shows, that has been largely overcome. LaunchPad prices start at under ten dollars.
Limitless applications
A list of all the compelling applications for a device this versatile would be limitless: Transporta-tion, consumer products, industrial systems, medical devices, avionics, and security are just some popular uses.
A self-driving prototype vehicle from Volvo.
The complex sys-tems needed for
autonomous vehicles are a possible
application for LaunchPad products.
With multiple systems that must be monitored, external signals that must be analyzed, the need for minimal power and maximum reliability, a system such as the LaunchPad development envi-ronment would seem to be ideal for the design and test phase. And it is not farfetched to think that the same sort of modules could find their way into the eventual product.
The LaunchPad Development Ecosystem is another solid addition to the very large and growing range of industrial products from TI. Engineers are effectively spoiled for choice. Engineers who want the sharpest tool in the shed will find it's really a warehouse.
Texas Instruments has sponsored promotion of their development solutions on ENGINEERING.com. They have no editorial input to this post - all opinions are mine. Arnie Peskin