Im just "researching" and I would like to know your opinion.
Which microcontroller do you prefer? Stellaris from TI or LCP from NXP? Other? Why?
I didn't use any. Altougth TI seems better for me because: more evaluation kits, TI licensed ARM technology longer ago than NXP (which may not mean nothing once Luminary Micro was bought by TI), TI seems to have better tools and support in general.
However it seems that LPC microcontrollers are more... famous?
What do you think?
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The LPC range is much larger - ARM7, Cortex-M0, -M3, etc. Tools are the same, With ARM chips one just uses the chip with the features one needs, it doesn't really matter who makes it.
I haven't used the NXP chips myself... but we recently switched one project over from using a modified Tritium TRI63 microcontroller (TI MSP430F149 MCU), to the Luminary Micro EK-LM3S8962 evaluation board. Granted, these things are not meant to be a final product, but this is a prototype. I was able to port my code across without much trouble, and after a few minor hiccups, it now functions quite well.
I'm finding the LM3S8962 quite nice to work with, and the EK-LM3S8962 is a very cheap board (about AU$150 through Farnell) to get started with. The same ARM toolchain (we use CodeSourcery ARM-EABI Lite, free download with sources available) will program most, if not all of both LI's and NXP's chips, but what makes the evaluation kit nice is that the debug interface is built-in by way of an FTDI serial I/O chip, which is hard-wired to the JTAG/SWI on its SPI side, and UART0 on its UART side.
Thus, if you're just getting started, you can program the board from a USB port without having to buy a separate JTAG device. The board also functions as a JTAG device for other Stellaris MCUs. You can of course plug in your own JTAG device too to program the board externally too.
I can't agree with Leon that it doesn't matter who makes the chip - apart from the obvious concerns like availability, the different manufacturers offer very different peripherals. They all offer 'quick start' libraries to make these easier to use but the performance hit from using them may be very high. I've just spent several days on a project getting rid of all the calls to ST's library with a significant improvement in performance and a massive reduction in code size. When you swap chips you need to learn all the peripherals for the new one and this may be an issue. Currently I think ST have the broadest range of ARM Cortex parts but you need to choose according to your own application and plans.
If the one you chose (based only on features) disappears tomorrow, then you may have a big job to get the product to work with another part, particularly if it is from a different mfr.
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