Beyond evaluation/target boards

Greetings,
  Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real
benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the
abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming?  What I mean is
that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
or any other.

  Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone
while your real design is maturing?  Some boards are awfully
expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely
necessary.

  Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured
target board to the actual design?

Thanks for any thoughts

-- A

> What I mean is
> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
> or any other.

This is the main reason why I never even considered such a board,
let alone buy one.
 I guess people use them mostly for learning or playing purposes,
whoever starts a real project design thinks end product board.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------
Dimiter Popoff               Transgalactic Instruments

http://www.tgi-sci.com
------------------------------------------------------

On Aug 8, 10:22 pm, amerdsp <amer...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>   Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real
> benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the
> abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming?  What I mean is
> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
> or any other.
>
>   Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone
> while your real design is maturing?  Some boards are awfully
> expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely
> necessary.
>
>   Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured
> target board to the actual design?
>
> Thanks for any thoughts
>
> -- A

"amerdsp" <amerdsp@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1186600972.288002.202790@22g2000hsm.googlegroups.com...
> Greetings,
>  Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real
> benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the
> abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming?  What I mean is
> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
> or any other.
>
>  Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone
> while your real design is maturing?  Some boards are awfully
> expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely
> necessary.
>
>  Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured
> target board to the actual design?

I've used several eval boards. They've allowed me to evaluate 
development tools, in-circuit programming, and performance [1]. In one 
or two (rare) cases, they've allowed me to fully prove the application 
software before our PCBs were ready.

[1] One app in particular ran a fairly heavy-duty pattern-crunching 
algorithm. It was comforting to know we'd selected the right CPU family 
and clock speed ahead of committing to hardware, and that the dev tools, 
at a certain level of optimisation (which turned out to be rather 
important), were up to the task.

YMMV.

Steve
http://www.fivetrees.com 

In comp.arch.embedded,
amerdsp <amerdsp@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>   Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real
> benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the
> abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming?  What I mean is
> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
> or any other.
>
>   Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone
> while your real design is maturing?  Some boards are awfully
> expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely
> necessary.
>
>   Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured
> target board to the actual design?

There are a number of reasons.
- You can start software development before designing/producing a board,
  this can save time on a project
- You can start software development on a known good board, so you do
  not end up debugging hardware and software at the same time
- Evaluating a chip without having to develop hardware
- Most evaluation boards come with schematics, examples, tools...
- Many more ...

Ofcourse the cost of an evaluation board is a consideration as well. You
will always need to check if the expense is worth the benefits. A lot of
evaluation boards are actually very cheap, much less than building your
own prototype.


-- 
Stef    (remove caps, dashes and .invalid from e-mail address to reply by mail)

amerdsp wrote:

> Greetings,
>   Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real
> benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the
> abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming?  What I mean is
> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
> or any other.
> 
>   Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone
> while your real design is maturing?  

Yes. They allow you to confirm you really HAVE chosen the right micro,
before the delay/cost of a specific PCB

In some cases, you could deign in a module, like the Rabbit, or ZDOTs
from Zilog. These are compact SMD 'business card' type modules, and
they come pre-assembled and tested. So for moderate volumes, that can
be appealing.


> Some boards are awfully
> expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely
> necessary.

Then avoid the expensive ones, and buy the cheaper ones :)

> 
>   Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured
> target board to the actual design?

If they have On Chip debug, quite easily.
Look at the Silabs tool sticks for examples.
The F41x / F53x have a USB Debug link, and you can even design in the
same connector onto your target PCB.

Some companies will release the PCB design files, if you ask nicely,
and that can also speed a design ramp-up.

-jg

In article <1186612104.060702.188020@d55g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, Didi
<dp@tgi-sci.com> writes
>> What I mean is
>> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
>> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
>> or any other.
>
>This is the main reason why I never even considered such a board,
>let alone buy one.
> I guess people use them mostly for learning or playing purposes,
>whoever starts a real project design thinks end product board.
>


Most people I know use the dev kit or reference design so they have some
hardware to run code on in the months before their own hardware is
available.

Also most dev kits give you the circuit diagram with sometimes helps
with your won designs.

In any event when software does not run on the new project board you
always have a bit or working HW to test on.

Dev kits are not expensive either unless you are doing things at home on
a budget.


Regards
   Chris

>Dimiter
>
>------------------------------------------------------
>Dimiter Popoff               Transgalactic Instruments
>
>http://www.tgi-sci.com
>------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Aug 8, 10:22 pm, amerdsp <amer...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>   Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real
>> benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the
>> abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming?  What I mean is
>> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
>> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
>> or any other.
>>
>>   Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone
>> while your real design is maturing?  Some boards are awfully
>> expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely
>> necessary.
>>
>>   Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured
>> target board to the actual design?
>>
>> Thanks for any thoughts
>>
>> -- A
>
>

-- 
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org      www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

> Most people I know use the dev kit or reference design so they have some
> hardware to run code on in the months before their own hardware is
> available.

Well I suppose different houses work differently, of course.

 Here I do both the hardware and software design, and there is up to a
month gap after finishing the board design and before it is here
ready; usually there is plenty of other work to fill that month up.
 Once the board is here, if it is a first time ever for me on that
CPU (but the CPU is of a family I have used), it can take a month or
so
until I get everything under control.
 If the CPU is of a new family, this is a much larger issue here
since I have to adopt all of my toolchain (I use no external
tools, I need no windows/linux etc., every design & debug thing runs
under DPS here, schematics/PCB editors included).
 So in that case the evaluation board might be useful,
but would be so little help that I don't even think of it, I just
build the new hardware, bite the bullet and get to work :-).
 To give an example, some time back I opted for a TI5420 DSP.
It took me the usual time to design the board, but it took an
extra 3-4 months to produce an assembler for it (I also had to
add features to the linker, the PC of these things counts
words and not bytes....).
 Oh, and since the 5420 was pushed to its limit in this
application it kept my brains busy for a few months during
my walks before I started to work on the project at all... :-).
The realtime part was really tight - a 10-cycle loop - which
might have been tested on an evaluation board, but looking
back now I think fumbling with it would have wasted me time
rather than saved some. If the 10-cycle loop had not
worked, the product would have ended up as scrap. OTOH,
evaluating a 10-cycle loop by "hand" is not hard at all,
it worked as specified, so evaluating that would have
only encouraged me to go on, which I seem to not have been
needing.... :-).

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------
Dimiter Popoff               Transgalactic Instruments

http://www.tgi-sci.com
------------------------------------------------------


On Aug 9, 12:00 pm, Chris Hills <ch...@phaedsys.org> wrote:
> In article <1186612104.060702.188...@d55g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, Didi
> <d...@tgi-sci.com> writes
>
> >> What I mean is
> >> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
> >> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
> >> or any other.
>
> >This is the main reason why I never even considered such a board,
> >let alone buy one.
> > I guess people use them mostly for learning or playing purposes,
> >whoever starts a real project design thinks end product board.
>
> Most people I know use the dev kit or reference design so they have some
> hardware to run code on in the months before their own hardware is
> available.
>
> Also most dev kits give you the circuit diagram with sometimes helps
> with your won designs.
>
> In any event when software does not run on the new project board you
> always have a bit or working HW to test on.
>
> Dev kits are not expensive either unless you are doing things at home on
> a budget.
>
> Regards
>    Chris
>
>
>
> >Dimiter
>
> >------------------------------------------------------
> >Dimiter Popoff               Transgalactic Instruments
>
> >http://www.tgi-sci.com
> >------------------------------------------------------
>
> >On Aug 8, 10:22 pm, amerdsp <amer...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> Greetings,
> >>   Forgive me if this sounds too primitive, but what are the real
> >> benefits of getting a target board for a certain chip with the
> >> abundance of JTAG and other in circuit programming?  What I mean is
> >> that most likely, your design is different from what the evaluation
> >> board has to offer and you have to program your device, be it an MCU
> >> or any other.
>
> >>   Are evaluation boards meant to give you a flavor of what can be cone
> >> while your real design is maturing?  Some boards are awfully
> >> expensive, and I am not completely convinced that they are absolutely
> >> necessary.
>
> >>   Moreover, how does one transition from developing on a preconfigured
> >> target board to the actual design?
>
> >> Thanks for any thoughts
>
> >> -- A
>
> --
> \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
> \/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
> /\/\/ ch...@phaedsys.org      www.phaedsys.org\/\/\
> \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Didi wrote:
> 
>> Most people I know use the dev kit or reference design so they
>> have some hardware to run code on in the months before their
>> own hardware is available.
> 
> Well I suppose different houses work differently, of course.

... Big snip ...

This evil practice of copying a section of quotation and retaining
the whole original is extremely annoying, and useless.  The purpose
of snipping is to avoid extraneous transmissions and storage.  The
net result of copying is messages that are often ignored, because
they are obviously excessively long.  Please snip the portion you
haven't copied, which eliminates any need to copy entirely.  

The following links may be helpful:
  <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>
  <http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html>
  <http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html>
  <http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/>  (taming google)

-- 
 Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
   Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
   <http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>



-- 
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

> The purpose of snipping is to avoid extraneous transmissions and storage.

Certainly not. The purpose of quoting a part of a text is to
direct the readers attention to this particular part.

Quoting the entire message is done in order to provide the
complete context in a single message - remember, this is
usenet and not a web forum where threads are linked for
every reader.

Your crusade is as laughable as is your religion.
Saving bits, yeah. So ones output posting to usenet
or wherever will drop from 20k/year to 5k/year, big
deal.
 Look at your calendar. The year is 2007, not 1985 where
you seem to live in.
If you have something meaningful to say, do so.
But please skip the archaic religious babble, I can ignore
it but I do find it stupid and annoying.
 Obviously I do not expect you to take note of that,
it is directed at anybody else reading this group.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------
Dimiter Popoff               Transgalactic Instruments

http://www.tgi-sci.com
------------------------------------------------------
On Aug 9, 7:11 pm, CBFalconer <cbfalco...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Didi wrote:
>
> >> Most people I know use the dev kit or reference design so they
> >> have some hardware to run code on in the months before their
> >> own hardware is available.
>
> > Well I suppose different houses work differently, of course.
>
> ... Big snip ...
>
> This evil practice of copying a section of quotation and retaining
> the whole original is extremely annoying, and useless.  The purpose
> of snipping is to avoid extraneous transmissions and storage.  The
> net result of copying is messages that are often ignored, because
> they are obviously excessively long.  Please snip the portion you
> haven't copied, which eliminates any need to copy entirely.  
>
> The following links may be helpful:
>   <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>
>   <http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html>
>   <http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html>
>   <http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/>  (taming google)
>
> --
>  Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
>    Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
>    <http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>
>
> --
> Posted via a free Usenet account fromhttp://www.teranews.com