Cheap ARM Board?

Hey all, I need advice and help finding the right board for the job. I'm a
student and need only need one board as it's for a hobby project.

I need an embedded board that:
* Is small (hopefully less than 70 x 70 mm). But anything that's less than
a pocket calculator's form factor is fine.
* Low power consuming.
* Has an ARM 7 or better processor.
* Can run QNX or Linux.
* Easy to program. I want to be able to quickly and easily program/reflash
the board.
* Good I/O support.
* Cheap. I'm on a budget and only need one board.

A great example would be the gumstix but it is too expensive (and I don't
need it to be that powerful, even a 50 MHz chip is fine for me, as long as
it can run Linux or QNX).

So if anyone knows of anything similar, I would appreciate your ideas.

On Tue, 2 Sep 2008, solarwind wrote:

> Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:05:32 -0500
> From: solarwind <x.solarwind.x@gmail.com>
> Newsgroups: comp.arch.embedded
> Subject: Cheap ARM Board?
> 
> Hey all, I need advice and help finding the right board for the job. I'm a
> student and need only need one board as it's for a hobby project.
>
> I need an embedded board that:
> * Is small (hopefully less than 70 x 70 mm). But anything that's less than
> a pocket calculator's form factor is fine.
> * Low power consuming.
> * Has an ARM 7 or better processor.
> * Can run QNX or Linux.
> * Easy to program. I want to be able to quickly and easily program/reflash
> the board.
> * Good I/O support.
> * Cheap. I'm on a budget and only need one board.
>
> A great example would be the gumstix but it is too expensive (and I don't
> need it to be that powerful, even a 50 MHz chip is fine for me, as long as
> it can run Linux or QNX).
>
> So if anyone knows of anything similar, I would appreciate your ideas.

Perhaps a better bang for the buck might be an entire computer -- A 
Nintendo DS runs DS-linux, plus a homebrew access card like an M3 Real 
and you can access flash cards with a FAT file system, 2 screens, WiFi,
touch screen etc etc ... for the cost of a used DS on Ebay, and an M3 
DS/Real + a 1GB or better SD card (micro?) ... cheap, easy and powerful.

3rd pary MEMS, IO and other interfaces exist as well ...

HTH,
Rob Sciuk

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"solarwind" <x.solarwind.x@gmail.com> writes:

> Hey all, I need advice and help finding the right board for the job. I'm a
> student and need only need one board as it's for a hobby project.
>
> I need an embedded board that:
> * Is small (hopefully less than 70 x 70 mm). But anything that's less than
> a pocket calculator's form factor is fine.
> * Low power consuming.
> * Has an ARM 7 or better processor.
> * Can run QNX or Linux.
> * Easy to program. I want to be able to quickly and easily program/reflash
> the board.
> * Good I/O support.
> * Cheap. I'm on a budget and only need one board.
>
> A great example would be the gumstix but it is too expensive (and I don't
> need it to be that powerful, even a 50 MHz chip is fine for me, as long as
> it can run Linux or QNX).

Sparkfun has some ARM board that are not very expensive imo.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?c=25

 S.

On Sep 2, 5:05 am, "solarwind" <x.solarwin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey all, I need advice and help finding the right board for the job. I'm a
> student and need only need one board as it's for a hobby project.
>
> I need an embedded board that:
> * Is small (hopefully less than 70 x 70 mm). But anything that's less than
> a pocket calculator's form factor is fine.
> * Low power consuming.
> * Has an ARM 7 or better processor.
> * Can run QNX or Linux.
> * Easy to program. I want to be able to quickly and easily program/reflash
> the board.
> * Good I/O support.
> * Cheap. I'm on a budget and only need one board.
>
> A great example would be the gumstix but it is too expensive (and I don't
> need it to be that powerful, even a 50 MHz chip is fine for me, as long as
> it can run Linux or QNX).
>
> So if anyone knows of anything similar, I would appreciate your ideas.

First I am no expert with QNX and my focus in ARM7 has been on the
LPC2000.
There are some proposals to tools, including boards but mostly
specific to the LPC2000 series from NXP on this site:
http://www.lpc2000.com/tools/indextools.html
http://www.lpctools.com
For boards capable of running Linux my best bet is
http://www.embeddedartists.com for high quality boards with Linux
support
for board only and less support http://www.olimex.com

Bob

Hi,

> So if anyone knows of anything similar, I would appreciate your ideas.

Please take a look at the Eddy Modules. Realtime Linux included.

http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/default.php?cPath=26_55

best regards
Thorsten