Beyond evaluation/target boards

Greetings, Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming? What I mean is that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU or any other.

Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone while your real design is maturing? Some boards are awfully expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely necessary.

Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured target board to the actual design?

Thanks for any thoughts

Reply to
amerdsp
Loading thread data ...

This is the main reason why I never even considered such a board, let alone buy one. I guess people use them mostly for learning or playing purposes, whoever starts a real project design thinks end product board.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments

formatting link

------------------------------------------------------

Reply to
Didi

I've used several eval boards. They've allowed me to evaluate development tools, in-circuit programming, and performance [1]. In one or two (rare) cases, they've allowed me to fully prove the application software before our PCBs were ready.

[1] One app in particular ran a fairly heavy-duty pattern-crunching algorithm. It was comforting to know we'd selected the right CPU family and clock speed ahead of committing to hardware, and that the dev tools, at a certain level of optimisation (which turned out to be rather important), were up to the task.

YMMV.

Steve

formatting link

Reply to
Steve at fivetrees

There are a number of reasons.

- You can start software development before designing/producing a board, this can save time on a project

- You can start software development on a known good board, so you do not end up debugging hardware and software at the same time

- Evaluating a chip without having to develop hardware

- Most evaluation boards come with schematics, examples, tools...

- Many more ...

Ofcourse the cost of an evaluation board is a consideration as well. You will always need to check if the expense is worth the benefits. A lot of evaluation boards are actually very cheap, much less than building your own prototype.

--
Stef    (remove caps, dashes and .invalid from e-mail address to reply by mail)
Reply to
Stef

Yes. They allow you to confirm you really HAVE chosen the right micro, before the delay/cost of a specific PCB

In some cases, you could deign in a module, like the Rabbit, or ZDOTs from Zilog. These are compact SMD 'business card' type modules, and they come pre-assembled and tested. So for moderate volumes, that can be appealing.

Then avoid the expensive ones, and buy the cheaper ones :)

If they have On Chip debug, quite easily. Look at the Silabs tool sticks for examples. The F41x / F53x have a USB Debug link, and you can even design in the same connector onto your target PCB.

Some companies will release the PCB design files, if you ask nicely, and that can also speed a design ramp-up.

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

In article , Didi writes

Most people I know use the dev kit or reference design so they have some hardware to run code on in the months before their own hardware is available.

Also most dev kits give you the circuit diagram with sometimes helps with your won designs.

In any event when software does not run on the new project board you always have a bit or working HW to test on.

Dev kits are not expensive either unless you are doing things at home on a budget.

Regards Chris

--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Chris Hills

Well I suppose different houses work differently, of course.

Here I do both the hardware and software design, and there is up to a month gap after finishing the board design and before it is here ready; usually there is plenty of other work to fill that month up. Once the board is here, if it is a first time ever for me on that CPU (but the CPU is of a family I have used), it can take a month or so until I get everything under control. If the CPU is of a new family, this is a much larger issue here since I have to adopt all of my toolchain (I use no external tools, I need no windows/linux etc., every design & debug thing runs under DPS here, schematics/PCB editors included). So in that case the evaluation board might be useful, but would be so little help that I don't even think of it, I just build the new hardware, bite the bullet and get to work :-). To give an example, some time back I opted for a TI5420 DSP. It took me the usual time to design the board, but it took an extra 3-4 months to produce an assembler for it (I also had to add features to the linker, the PC of these things counts words and not bytes....). Oh, and since the 5420 was pushed to its limit in this application it kept my brains busy for a few months during my walks before I started to work on the project at all... :-). The realtime part was really tight - a 10-cycle loop - which might have been tested on an evaluation board, but looking back now I think fumbling with it would have wasted me time rather than saved some. If the 10-cycle loop had not worked, the product would have ended up as scrap. OTOH, evaluating a 10-cycle loop by "hand" is not hard at all, it worked as specified, so evaluating that would have only encouraged me to go on, which I seem to not have been needing.... :-).

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments

formatting link

------------------------------------------------------

On Aug 9, 12:00 pm, Chris Hills wrote:

Reply to
Didi

... Big snip ...

This evil practice of copying a section of quotation and retaining the whole original is extremely annoying, and useless. The purpose of snipping is to avoid extraneous transmissions and storage. The net result of copying is messages that are often ignored, because they are obviously excessively long. Please snip the portion you haven't copied, which eliminates any need to copy entirely.

The following links may be helpful: (taming google)

--
 Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
   Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
Reply to
CBFalconer

Certainly not. The purpose of quoting a part of a text is to direct the readers attention to this particular part.

Quoting the entire message is done in order to provide the complete context in a single message - remember, this is usenet and not a web forum where threads are linked for every reader.

Your crusade is as laughable as is your religion. Saving bits, yeah. So ones output posting to usenet or wherever will drop from 20k/year to 5k/year, big deal. Look at your calendar. The year is 2007, not 1985 where you seem to live in. If you have something meaningful to say, do so. But please skip the archaic religious babble, I can ignore it but I do find it stupid and annoying. Obviously I do not expect you to take note of that, it is directed at anybody else reading this group.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments

formatting link

------------------------------------------------------ >

Reply to
Didi

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.