2 replies to this topic

[Illishar]

Hello there, While I wait for the Netduino LwIP to fix it self, I'm playing around with some native development. Eg. FreeRTOS. I'm considering wheter or not to buy the AT91SAM7X-EK development board, to get a little extra debug. Have anyone tried it? Is it ridiculously easy to get some 'breakpoints' etc. up and going? The reason why I'm asking is that I have a lot of bad debug experience with combos like GNU, Eclipse and JTAG. It's rarely worth the trouble. And the AT91SAM7X-EK still costs 200$ or so. Is it worth it?

[Chris Walker]

Hi illishar, Two trains of thought: 1. Of course it's worth it. Go for it. Grab GCC, research and find your favorite compatible open source debugger, etc. 2. From my experience: nice tools are easy. But they're about $10k. I suppose that's part of the reason why we love .NET MF so much. Also: The SAM7X-EK board comes with the 256KB chip. It's not available with the 512KB chip. You'll want to remove the 256KB chip and replace it with a 512KB chip. If you're comfortable with that. BTW, we've actually burned through all the reflash cycles on one of the dev boards (flash errors due to 10,000's of rewrites). That's one of the nice things about having a $35 board...if you actually ever got to that limit, the decision to buy another board rather than re-hand-soldering another 100+ pin LQFP is an easier one. Chris

[Illishar]

Sounds like I should stick with the Netduinos. If I manage to get the LED working, I can get on from there I think. Blink twice if you agree. After that there's the uart. Get that to work and I'll have some printf debuggin.