Super-low cost Zilog ZNEO dev kit + contest

Hello group,

This is more or less a follow-up to the thread about freebies and cheap development environments. This has already been announced in this group, but I'm not sure if it has been noticed.

To launch their 16-bit ZNEO product, Zilog is offering through Mouser a special "contest kit" for the wallet-bleeding sum of 50$. Considering it includes a full development environment with C compiler, an USB debugging probe and other gizmos, that's a very sweet deal for developpers (especially beginners) on a budget.

And if you feel inclined to work quickly, well you might be able to earn a bit of cash through the aforementionned contest and pay off the fifth mortgage you had to take to buy the dev kit. :)

I'm also working on tracing back the roots of the ZNEO core to the z8000 and z80000 from the available documentation, but that will take an other while before being completed.

Good coding everyone! Regards, D.

formatting link
formatting link

PS: What a shameless plug. Zilog, I really hope you took notice of that and I'll be soon finding some parcels on my doorstep! :D

Reply to
D.
Loading thread data ...

Seeing that Zilog are actually giving the ZNEO a bit of push with the design contest (thanks for that D.) I think it is also appropriate to announce a ZNEO Yahoo group. At the moment it just contains a few links but I will be adding more to it especially as this contest heats up.

The ZNEO is an interesting 32-bit processor with 16-bit instructions and has a good mix of peripherals that I am sure will find itself a cozy spot in many applications.

formatting link

*Peter*
Reply to
Peter Jakacki

D,

One thing to keep in mind is that they released the eZ80/Acclaim with a lot of similar fanfair. They have both been all but forgotten in favor of the Encore. Technical support is poor (1 wrong answer a day). If this is for fun, then go ahead. If you are serious about a commercial product then you may want to reconsider.

Dave,

Reply to
Dave Boland

Hello Dave,

I couldn't agree more. I've also had to deal with their technical support, and I ended up doubting that I spoke with some human that could understand English...

It's really a pity, as it seems some (technical) people go to great lengths to get things to work correctly, while some other (management, PR, support and such) probably don't care.

For their defense, the eZ80 came out before they went into bankrupcy IIRC, at which point they changed management and tried to clean up their act. I believe they more or less managed in doing so, at the expense of a few product lines. Now the post-bankrupcy CEO has resigned, and they're looking for a new one: who knows where they'll go from there...

Those problems have undoubtly lost them a great deal of reputation and contracts through the years. No-one wants to deal with an unstable company with an unstable product line and poor client support... Again it's really a pity, as they have some nice products!

Even considering all those issues, it's still nice to play around with a clean, orthogonal 16-bits CISC processor in a low-cost dev kit. ;)

Regards, D.

Reply to
D.

Cypress is giving away their PSoC ExpressEval kits (two PSoCEval1 boards, two chips and a MiniProg programmer) while stocks last (usual price is $99). I got one the other day.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

Do you have a link?, I have just searched their website, and find no mention of it. Would like to get one myself. Allen.

--
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 0640-3, 05/10/2006
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Allen

[no need to see this message in THREE successive posts... :< ] [ZNEO announcement]

That seems to be the trend, nowadays. Either charge for support or give crappy support. Seems to be no middle ground.

Unfortunately, this pattern goes back a LONG way: essentially GIVING the Z180n market to the 64180 (in all its variations), the Z280 "released any day now", the Z380, the Z80000, the eZ80, etc. Zilog likes to make lots of noise -- but with a piss poor follow through.

Though, at least their product reputation is a bit better than NatSemi (when it comes to processors)

--don

Reply to
Don

It is difficult to find:

Leon

Reply to
Leon

of

The free offer seems to have disappeared, they probably haven't got any left.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

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.