NXP MCUs, Nand and Linux

But as anyone knows, SD cards are not suitable for environments prone to vibrations. All the more if there is no need for the memory to be removable. The chips I've been using don't support anything beyond SPI, so I'm stuck with eSD or eMMC which are very hard to come by.

 

 

       if i'm not wrong the statement is wrong. SD cards are not prone to any vibration, they are used allong with devices with such things on them such as mobiles and secondly most SD cards work on NAND flash chips in them.

 

NAND support isn't officially listed in the LPC17xx family.

Still embeddedartists is selling an LPC1788 board with 128mb of flash storage at the same price of a much more powerfull LPC3250 devboard.

 

there is written nowhere that NXP don't support them and also in Primecell datasheet they haven't mentioned exclusively about not supporting NAND flash also one more thing before mentioning the examples supported by them they have mentioned a note "the list is not exhaustive" so you can assume there is great support provided by primecell.

Also About libraries most of the peripheral libraries you will get along with the software as mentioned on the page you mentioned and the left either you can build themselves using great user manual of lpc177x/8x or you can find easily via googling or on NXP community website(best location to find libraries).

about compiler you can use keil but it is available for free upto only 32kb of code a very small size so you will require other means. for embedded coding it is the best IDE ii have ever seen.

as for the other ide most probably you will be getting is code red suite which is eclipse based so if you are comfortable with eclipse based embedded IDE's then go for it.

Mr. Purohit

it depends on the kind of vibrations: when talking about industrial machinery, slot mechanisms are not advisable.

Regarding Nand

a datasheet is an informative document depicting the capabilities of a product.

If something's not listed in there, it most probably isn't supported.

Otherwise every manufacturer would face legal hurdles trying to defend from people suing because product X wasn't able to do thing Y not listed in the manual.

Now supporting NAND requires a lot of below-the-surface processing (wear leveling, ecc, ...).

The fact you *could* do this in software is only a statement to the proficency of those who made the 8086: being programmable it could support NAND too!

But supporting a technology in the sense of having the means to easily interface with it is another matter.

Maybe I should rephrase: does the LPC1788 have hardware support/acceleration for NAND?

Regarding the IDE

I'm an independent developer and at the moment I can't take into consideration buying an IDE like Keil.

What are the free alternatives that don't hinder the capabilities of a programmer?

32KBs is for amateurs really.

Claudio - if you are using NXP ARM you could possibly switch to ST ARM without too much pain. Some of the STM32Fxxx chips support NAND flash fairly well at hardware level. ST offer a lot of example code and drivers (with source). As far as support libraries are concerned you could use the Keil tools but they are very expensive (> £5000 unlimited code size with all the libraries). I have this tool set and while I rate the compiler as good my experience with the libraries could best be described as "mixed".

If cash is tight I would not recommend that you go that way.

The alternatives are Code Red, Raisonance, "pure" GCC, Rowley and many others - you need to look very carefully at what you get.

As far as  getting ready made code for NAND wear leveling etc - my experience of free library code and mid price paid-for code (eg Keil) for TCP/IP and FAT32 file support is that you will either have to pay a lot more or write it yourself to get anything more than very plain vanilla support.

Good luck with the hunting and please let me know if you find anything good (eg file writing from C that supports the standard library functions properly (ie all options supported) or TCP/IP which supports send/receive of multi fragment UDP or TCP messages with out of order fragments up to the RFC limits).

Michael Kellett

Thanks for the headsup Michael.

I come from Microchip actually. No experience on ARM whatsoever.

And one the most effective tie-ins of MCHP is their free IDE+unlimited compiler. Where they offer you to pay is to unlock the optimizations.

Still you can get away with a free 32bit compiler and 512KBs of compiled source code for nothing.

They offer extensive library support (albeit I'm sure you could come out a lot better with 3rd party payware code, their libraries aren't state of the art) for lots of things.

Fact is I'm not into very high-power devices or multimedia, I'm into industrial controllers so really powerfull linux drivers for example have never been on my radar.

Same goes for high troughput ethernet, or media-accelerated graphics.

Most of my work has to do with multiplexed analog sampling, pids, data sharing on rs485 buses.

I'm moving slowly towards more "human-interface" devices, but I'm still far from a handheld of any kind.

So I guess even basic vanilla support would do for the moment, I'm not doing a full-hd stereo camcorder ;)

But the compiler limitations are really what's preventing me from buying a dev kit right now.

I can't spend thousands for a compiler+ide, I simply don't have that money, so I'm looking for free alternatives and trying to gauge the eventual limitations.

Hello Claudio,

It looks to me as if there is very little below £1000 for a commercial license to support ARM Cortex parts - so if you must go ARM you will need to build your own GCC package to do it for less. If you are developing commercial products this may not be the best use of your time.

Michael Kellett

I was afraid of that.

It's just that currently I have noone paying for my training on ARM archs, and I wished to get started by myself in my freetime.

Like toying around with the LPC Xpresso which is free but supports very few MCUs, especially in the higher ranges.

It looks like this kind of industry is focused on a much bigger scale of things than the one I am into.

I was afraid of that.

It's just that currently I have noone paying for my training on ARM archs, and I wished to get started by myself in my freetime.

Like toying around with the LPC Xpresso which is free but supports very few MCUs, especially in the higher ranges.

It looks like this kind of industry is focused on a much bigger scale of things than the one I am into.