Hands on the $13 TI Stellaris LaunchPad

You're looking at my latest digital gadget, an ARM-based Stellaris LaunchPad. At the heart of the board is an ARM Cortex-M4 32-bit CPU running at a modest (by today's standards) 80MHz. It comes along with 256K of FLASH and 32KB of SRAM.

Here’s a composite block diagram of the TI Stellaris series that shows the large number of goodies you can get on one inexpensive piece of silicon:


It won't run Linux or Android or any other major operating system, but for writing executives, interrupt handlers and I/O manipulators in C or assembler down at the bare silicon, it has more than enough raw computational power.

You get a couple of switches and an RGB LED. Finally, the pins broken out to .100″ male+female headers, which is nice. Notably, the male pins are facing up – opposite of Arduino, but perhaps more desirable. It means you can’t plunk it down into a breadboard, but then you couldn’t anyway since each row of headers is dual. Instead, it’ll be much easier to wire-wrap to, which is what you’d probably be using male pins for anyway.