And if so, you’re set for some cheap Arduino power. Before rushing out to order your own Stellaris board, install Energia and examine the available functions and libraries to make sure you can run what you need. However the good news as far as we’re concerned is that you can now use it with the Energia Arduino-compatible IDE that we examined previously. This LaunchPad has the in-circuit debugger, two user buttons, an RGB LED and connectors for I/O and shield-like booster packs: That’s a bucket of power, memory and I/O for not much money – you can get the LaunchPad board for around $15. It’s an incredibly powerful and well-featured MCU – which offers an 80 MHz, 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 CPU with floating point, 256 Kbytes of 100,000 write-erase cycle FLASH and many peripherals such as 1MSPS ADCs, eight UARTs, four SPIs, four I2Cs, USB & up to 27 timers, some configurable up to 64-bits. In the same manner as their MSP430 development board, Texas Instruments also have another LaunchPad board with their powerful Stellaris LM4F120H5QR microcontroller. It is certainly easier than building your own scheduler for this type of hardware. Well… we know it’s not a multi-core system like the Propeller but we’ll let it slide. The announcement post linked above mentions that these Sketches are running “in parallel”.
You simply launch a new tab and start coding as if you’re using a completely separate piece of hardware. The UI divorces you from thinking about the hardware at all. It’s upon the TI Real Time Operating System (TI-RTOS) but wraped in the familiar IDE. The Energia multitasking will handle this for you.
But these are not always easy to set up unless you are intimately comfortable with this particular architecture. If you wanted to do this closer to the metal you’re talking about multiple timers, or multiple compares on a single timer, perhaps a interrupt-driven-system-tick that has a high enough resolution for a wide range of your blinking needs. The simplest is blinking LEDs at different rates. The announcement post gives a couple of examples of uses for multitasking. They just came out with a multitasking system built into Energia targeted at the ARM Cortex-M4F based MSP432 Launchpad which we covered a few weeks back. Energia is the Arduino-like-framework for Texas Instruments based boards. If the IDE doesn’t keep up what’s the point? Now we have at least one answer to that problem. We keep wondering where the Arduino world is headed with the hardware getting more and more powerful.
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