Looking for a low cost starter kit.

A google search will show that there are many ia32 based SBC units out
there and you can program them with free 3rd party linux distros like
fedora core running on a control PC.  If you want a complete solution then
I'd suggest looking at the arcom.com kits based on their PC104 Intel ARM
CPU boards.

I think you are being a bit unrealistic in your price limit though.

The AVR32 Gateway kit runs Linux and cost $79...
The Linux BSP is a free Download as is the AVR32 Studio
(an Eclipse based build environment soon to be available)

Correction:
 The AVR32 Gateway kit runs Linux and cost $69...

And we both know that the kit that is actually useful is the STK1000,
which retails for $500usd: 2.5 times the OPs price limit.

It all depends on what he wants to do.
Not so many peripherals on the boards 2 x 10/100, SD-Card +  UART + USB
It allows mounting three 2 x 18 pin headers making most of the AP7000 I/O
pins available.

There is no LCD available with the kit, but the LCD signals
seems to come out on the J7 header.
At least VSYNC, HSYNC, PCLK and D[21:0].

The STK1000 has 8 MB Flash and 8 MB (by 32) SDRAM.
The Gateway has 8 MB parallel flash, 8 MB Dataflash and 32 MB SDRAM (by 16)
The by 16 configuration makes the Gateway slower than the STK1000, but
some would think that more memory will make the Gateway more useful.
I think late generation STK1000 has more memory though

I would not call it useless.

Thanks for the information.

I'm new to this field.
I know I'll encount many problems of the learning process.
One thing I learned hardware is hard to repair once it's damaged. I
don't wanna take a big risk at this point.



Ulf Samuelsson C0%DBBC%BA:

I couldn't work out from the site whether this board support an LCD
interface. The CPU seems to have one but so no meantion for the board. I'm
looking for something like this for small production quantities but do need
to be able to drive a 1/4-full VGA.

Peter

Check out embeddedarm.com - the TS7300 has a daughterboard (TS733) that
will drive a QVGA display.

--Yan

@y66g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:



For this sort of thing the cheapest, best supported approach is to just use
an old PC. Most people who have been doing computing for a while and most
offices have old computers that no one wants because they wont run XP, disk
is too small or something. Also in these days of the big LCDs many people
are throwing out older crt monitors. So I believe with a little scrounging
you can get your hardware for free.

Linux and embedded Linux sources and tools are easily available and free
too.

Just my $.02

Regards, Steve

I'd suggest you check out the gumstix. (http://www.gumstix.com )
Cheers,
Yaman