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According to the page you linked to, the development environment is closed source and requires a license. It does say the hardware platform is open and documented, but the toolchain, which is what people end up doing their work, is not -- they don't even seem to target Linux, let alone Mac OS X, which Arduino does. Weirdly, their "Code Composer Studio" is built on Eclipse but requires an license and activation file, and a "30-day trial" is mentioned. Here be dragons...

If someone is thinking about getting into this, I would suggest you weigh the options between this and the TI LaunchPad

The LaunchPad doesn't have any 'shields', but if you're just looking for basic IO, it's MUCH cheaper with a full dev kit for under $5.

You also program it in real C, not the pseudo-C that is the Arduino language.
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If you have an Arduino and are lucky enough to have a copy of RealTime Workshop for Matlab laying around. (Most universities should have this installed on their computers. I know the ME department where I go has FULL Matlab on all computers).

There is a Simulink Arduino target: http://www.mathworks.com/academia/arduino-software/arduino-simulink.html Meaning no coding needed on your behalf, just setup your Simulink model and go. Great for controls engineers that may know how to sim something in Simulink, but not how to convert that to Arduino.

Sounds similar to SmartReflex (tm) which is shipping on millions of phones.
http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbugencontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12032&contentId=4609&DCMP=WTBU&HQS=ProductBulletin+PR+smartreflex

Where it differs is that there is an on-chip regulator to do the dynamic scaling.
The TI solution has a couple of regulators on-chip, with a couple of output voltages, as well as a more variable external solution.

The above device has variable regulators on-chip. (for annoying technical reasons, these are linear regulators, not switching,
so if they regulate to 50% output - half the (reduced amount of power needed) is wasted as heat.

-update- it was officially announced! http://education.ti.com/calculators/products/US/nspire-family/

If it's just cheap and affordable you're looking for, take a look at the MSP430 LaunchPad. Less than $5.

Getting the crystal in is less than fun, but still, that's one cheap board.

LaunchPad does.

I don't see why this hasn't gotten more fanfare or attention.
A full dev kit costs $4.30. Some of the Arduino stuff I've seen starts at $40. You get 2 chips, a USB programmer, dev environment AND.... a real C environment. Not another language.

It has a ton of other add-ons like the EZ430-CHRONOS watch. After growing up watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit, who hasn't wanted to unlock their doors with Shave and a Haircut.

From Texas Instruments.

All Android phones released in 2010 were capped at 1Ghz with chips from either Qualcomm or Samsung. The Samsung Infuse 4G is the first phone I'm aware of that at stock is greater than 1Ghz (it is 1.2Ghz).

Almost all the Motorola Android phones, and all the high-end ones currently shipping, use TI OMAP processors.

First, Droid (Milestone) in 2009 used a TI OMAP 3430

Later, Droid X in 2010 used a TI OMAP 3630 at 1Ghz

Finally, Droid 2 Global Launched on Nov 9 2001 with a 1.2 GHz TI OMAP processor

All Android phones released in 2010 were capped at 1Ghz with chips from either Qualcomm or Samsung. The Samsung Infuse 4G is the first phone I'm aware of that at stock is greater than 1Ghz (it is 1.2Ghz).

Almost all the Motorola Android phones, and all the high-end ones currently shipping, use TI OMAP processors.

First, Droid (Milestone) in 2009 used a TI OMAP 3430

Later, Droid X in 2010 used a TI OMAP 3630 at 1Ghz

Finally, Droid 2 Global Launched on Nov 9 2001 with a 1.2 GHz TI OMAP processor

The N900 have full flash, at least version 9.4. Version 10.1 is available to ARM too, just not widely available for the N900 (you can try asking for it here)

Child please. I am a TI engineer.

GM and Freescale are liars. Texas Instruments has been shipping a dual core ARMv7 embedded flash automotive controller in production that runs at close to 200MHz for more than a year now: http://focus.ti.com/pr/docs/preldetail.tsp?sectionId=594&prelId=sc08145

And it has more integrated peripherals than Freescale's johnny-come-lately offering.

For those who think 128MHz is slow for an auto chip, you don't know the incredible engineering challenge it takes to create a chip that must survive extreme environments, ranging from 127C to -40C, with all kinds of electronic and temperature stresses, integrate a couple dozen peripherals and a highly reliable embedded flash memory that cannot afford to fail a single bit during its lifetime, and do so while achieving defect rates that are less than 0.01 times the typical rate for microprocessors.

Pick out your old guidebook to your ti83, and compare it to http://education.ti.com/guidebooks/graphing/85/85book-eng.pdf

From a quick read of the user quide I see that their OMAP3 platform apparently has two modules for the camera interface; a "Camera ISP" module which fetches data from the CCD in raw, yuv, rgb or jpeg format, and a "IVA" module, which appears to be a DSP with hardcoded functionality for mainstream codecs but can also be programmed for what they call "emerging" codecs. This module can then DMA its output to the application CPU module. All the cores are on the same SOC and are interconnected with two Sonics buses, one of which must bear the bandwidth of the data coming from the sensor.

What's impressive is that there is much less hardcoded logic involved than one might think. The OMAP4 leaflet claims its IVA core can deliver 30fps 1080p encoding and decoding for h.264 hp, mpeg4 asp, vc-1 ap, mpeg2 mp and on2 vp7.

http://focus.ti.com//general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12843&contentId=53243#omap4Benefits. Seems to do similar things but has more technical information rather than just a press release.

Well, that, and the Droid (as well as plenty of other smartphones) already have an FM receiver, it's just not supported in software. The Droid's is a TI WL1271 that supports both receive and transmit.

I used a fancy ~$120 ti graphing calculator in high school for calculus. I did terrible.

I used a less fancy ti calculator that I got for like $15 in college. I did quite a lot better.

I don't know if I'm just old, but I never did enjoy messing around with graphing calculators for math. It might be great for learning BASIC and so on, but for mathematics, get me a normal calculator with just numbers. Or possibly an abacus for simpler stuff. Always did like using an abacus.

Who the hell needs a graphing calculator on a standardized test? Why do standardized tests allow them at all? Hell, at the level of middle and high school standardized tests, you needn't even a calculator at all. I just graduated with a B.S. in Physics, and all but a very, very few times did we ever need calculators; tests were done with abstract variables, as you don't need numbers to show that you understand how to solve a problem.

And if you must absolutely have a calculator for a test, I can think of absolutely zero times where a graphing calculator is required. The TI's fantastic Scientific TI-3X lineup is much, much more than is sufficient for anything that you'll ever need below graduate school. And even in graduate school, you're more likely to need to use a computer, not the paltry processing power of a graphing calculator.

To date, the only real use for a graphing calculator I've ever had that I couldn't use a simpler calculator for is the TI-89's fantastic units, so I could calculate long strings of physics equations without ever needing to convert the units (since the calculator did the unit converting for me).

Unfortunately today, Ti is more concerned about sales vs functionality, and the NSpire is the pinnacle of this philosophy.

Ti's focus is to sell NSpires directly to high schools, so when they ask high schools what they want in a calculator, the first thing they say is "Not a Gameboy" and the 2nd is "use it on ACT/SAT" Stripping the program functionality solves problem #1 and a standardzed test mode called Press to test solves Problem #2.

Now not all of this is Ti's fault. Standardized tests are unbelievably strict when it comes to their test taking procedures. I'm currently the test administrator for our college's ACT's compass college placement test system. ACT requires you to first install a special lockdown browser to your system which administers the test and register the MAC address of your computer systems to ACT. During the test, you must supply scratch paper which you must collect and destroy once the test is complete. They also want students to only use supplied pencils and not their own. All electronic devices must not be visible before, during and after the test, this also includes calculators, since ACT requires the only calculator used is the on screen calculator. Now I know Why ACT requires this stuff (to protect their test & minimize cheating) but if these are the requirements that they have for this system it has to be even more strict for the pen and paper ACT. Now imagine that Ti want's their calculators in on these tests.

It's a shame that Ti has all but abandoned the Engineering / College math market. The Ti-89/92 series was an excellent calculator and it's a shame that they still do more then the nspire, especially when the nspire has so much processing power to burn. For what it's worth, Ti is fixated on keeping the 82 series around with rehashes (83/84/+/etc) until the end of time, while phasing out their more capable models (the 85/86 and 89/92 variants) and replacing them with inferior models (such as the Nspire).

They do. Tons of them. Nspire hackers seem not to realize they're trying to break into the one model that TI wants to keep down for testing security reasons, when they've sold to and supported the homebrew community for years with the rest of their lineup. It's ridiculous.

http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbugencontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12316&contentId=4629 - There isn't a separate e-fuse chip, it's almost surely built into the OMAP.

Most microcontrollers have eFuses now for various purposes. For example Atmel AVRs have them for clock selection and (optionally) final lockdown of the chip to protect someone from reading back the program inside it (RSTDISBL, SPIEN)

It's a pity that the TWL4030 is rather less interesting than it sounds. Unless "power and performance management" is some banal-yet-slightly-intimidating BDSM euphemism...

You mean like this little puppy?

Looking at the datasheets for a few TI C64 DSPs, we are looking at supply voltages under 2v and current draws measured in microamps (yes, micro, smaller than milli).

The power draw for these special-purpose devices is teeeny tiny compared to the other hardware.

http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/tms320c6424 (PDF) - Page 127 lists electrical characteristics in the normal operating temperature range.

More models listed here:
http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?family=dsp&sectionId=2&tabId=217&familyId=477

Supply current is definitely not microamps, with PLL, I/O, and core consumption during encoding you're looking at closer to 1A.

Looking at the datasheets for a few TI C64 DSPs, we are looking at supply voltages under 2v and current draws measured in microamps (yes, micro, smaller than milli).

The power draw for these special-purpose devices is teeeny tiny compared to the other hardware.

http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/tms320c6424 (PDF) - Page 127 lists electrical characteristics in the normal operating temperature range.

More models listed here:
http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?family=dsp&sectionId=2&tabId=217&familyId=477

Supply current is definitely not microamps, with PLL, I/O, and core consumption during encoding you're looking at closer to 1A.

Looking at the datasheets for a few TI C64 DSPs, we are looking at supply voltages under 2v and current draws measured in microamps (yes, micro, smaller than milli).

The power draw for these special-purpose devices is teeeny tiny compared to the other hardware.

http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/tms320c6424 (PDF) - Page 127 lists electrical characteristics in the normal operating temperature range.

More models listed here:
http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?family=dsp&sectionId=2&tabId=217&familyId=477

Looking at the datasheets for a few TI C64 DSPs, we are looking at supply voltages under 2v and current draws measured in microamps (yes, micro, smaller than milli).

The power draw for these special-purpose devices is teeeny tiny compared to the other hardware.

http://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/tms320c6424 (PDF) - Page 127 lists electrical characteristics in the normal operating temperature range.

More models listed here:
http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?family=dsp&sectionId=2&tabId=217&familyId=477

An alternative to the PIC is Texas Instrument's MSP430. It is a pretty good target for C, USB-based developer kits run for $20 for regular boards & $50 for boards with wireless transmitters, and one of the cooler things is that it is meant to run off of two AAA batteries.

http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/ez430-rf2500.html

That TI's mated to their ARM cpus? TI DaVinci

No sorry, battery data is not read only ... Have anywhere that says that laptop batteries are read only ?

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/bq20z90-v110.html

Proof of TI.

You're right, a 600MHz ARM can not decode 1080p HD video, a 2-odd GHz Core 2 Duo (with no other hardware acceleration) struggles to do that.

The Beagleboard also has a ::href="http://www.bdti.com/procsum/tic64xx.htm">TMS320C64x DSP that can decode HD video.

TI also make a DaVinci SoC that can do realtime HD transcoding - decoding and reencoding.

Over on YouTube is a beagleboard doing 720p HD video already...

I'm not sure how much L2 cache the OMAP3430 in the N900 comes with - TI's documentation is oddly silent on that topic

16K L1 I-cache, 16K L1 D-cache, 256K L2

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html
http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?family=dsp&sectionId=2&tabId=2218&familyId=1525&paramCriteria=no

I'm not sure how much L2 cache the OMAP3430 in the N900 comes with - TI's documentation is oddly silent on that topic

16K L1 I-cache, 16K L1 D-cache, 256K L2

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html
http://focus.ti.com/paramsearch/docs/parametricsearch.tsp?family=dsp&sectionId=2&tabId=2218&familyId=1525&paramCriteria=no

However, you can't really claim that you are selling a TI calculator at a loss hoping to make the additional money from software sales, nor can you really claim that hacking the calculator makes you loose any money.

Actually they can. Althought they are definitly not selling the calc at a loss.

Although the OS key really doesn't hurt Ti, The Application signing key is the one they are probably most worried about, since they used to charge a fee to sign shareware/bought apps and bought flashapps use the key to protect from being copied from calc to calc. They also used to use the key to limit app size, but a lot of that was circumvented over time.

See here Although the information seems to be lacking on if there is still a cost involved to get a key.

Although a Ti-83 can definitely be enhanced by a custom OS, the usefulness of a Ti-83 would greatly decrease for students if custom OS's existed. On many standardized tests, including the SATs and ACTs, the tests specify which calculators are permitted for the test. They have a very specific list, based on which ones they think are not too powerful and would give an unfair advantage to a test taker. All ti-83's are allowed on either test for example. But if the makers of the test knew that people could have ti-83's that had undocumented, unfair functions (such as symbolic algebraic solving as in the ti-89), the test makers would most likely disallow these calculators. Why do you think TI still sells the Ti-83 plus, a calculator created in 1999? Certainly hardware abilities and processor speeds have greatly increased in the last 10 years. The reason is that test makers will not accept calculators with very powerful abilities. They want the student to solve the problem and not the calculator. When browsing calculators at education.ti.com, each calculator has a page called "exam acceptance" (ex. http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_ti83p.html?bid=2). That is because TI sells a large number of its calculators to students. The custom OS's could greatly hurt TI's reputation in the eyes of its biggest supporters: the test makers.

Actually, they don't sell apps anymore: all of them are free (gratis) to download.

Even eepro

There seems to be a lot of comments about how the average joe is going to be pissy when he discovers that he can't run his windows applications on his arm netbook, or print well for that matter. That is obvious, and therefore redundant to talk about. This is a website dedicated to (hopefully intelligent) nerds, right? I'm more interested in running Linux anyway, or possibly an up-and-coming Mac OS X for ARM.

I would like to say to DELL - excellent idea!!! ARM for netbooks / smartbooks only makes perfect sense! The battery will last longer, they're fully capable of doing everything that a netbook should (including all multimedia applications), they're SILENT / FANLESS. All of that makes me (a green geek / engineer) very happy! If you could pull off an aluminium unibody, then you would have Apple beat if they ever got around to making a Mac smartbook.

My advice though, is to choose your components wisely. People won't want to wait for application contexts to be reactivated from swap, so make sure that you have enough RAM to keep everything going. Also, make sure that you prelink all binaries so that loading times are much faster! Last but not least, I would highly recommend that you choose a dual-core ARM SoC like the TI OMAP-4, which is based on the Cortex-A9 ARM family. With dual-cores, there would be many more pipelines available for concurrent threads, which means very little noticeable lag times.

Specifically for the OMAP, I really hope that the integrated PowerVR 3D graphics core and integrated video codec will get full Linux support at some point soon. TI seems pretty dedicated to supporting Linux on their devices, so I don't think that full support is unrealistic. The enhanced DSP ARM instructions will accelerate any multimedia applications in the mean time, and those are fully supported by GCC, with optimizations in the works for mplayer, ffmpeg, etc, until a decent architecture-agnostic kernel drm layer is in place, with PowerVR / IVA support.

For Windows enthusiasts, I'm sure that Windows 7 will be available at some point for ARM, as we have seen some of the demonstrations already at Computex (although Android seemed to be much easier to port). Will Microsoft even bother making a compatibility layer for ARM? I have to hand it to Apple, that they are in a better position than MS to make a fully featured ARM netbook, given their universal binary format in Mac OS X.

I've actually been in the same situation myself, two free (as in beer) SPICE derivatives I've found to work well are LTspice and TINA-spice (from linear and Texas Instruments respectively). They are windows binaries but function very well in WINE (in fact the developer(s) for LTspice have designed it to function as well as possible with WINE).

I've mostly used LTspice and it works very well and has a low learning threshold. Of course you can insert spice directives in the schematic to do more advanced functions like basic parameter sweeps as well as monte-carlo simulations and so on and so forth. Check out LTspice's yahoo group for a bunch of documentation.

As far as other recommendations for eagle go I doubt that's what you're looking for as eagle is solely for schematic capture and pcb design, there are no simulation capabilities in it.

You got modded informative because you had nVidia in a link.

TI always pairs their Cortex CPUs with beefy DSPs capable of very complex decoding. The OMAP 3530(in use in devices right now) is able to decode 720p h.264 by offloading it to the DSP. A DSP is similar to a GPU, but this one lacks floating point capabilities. It's just really fast for integer stuff.

They'll probably pair an even faster one for the Cortex A9's, enabling 1080p h.264.

It would also be great if they included a graphics chip (or gpu as part of a SoC system) that could handle h.264 decoding for the netbook.

The OMAP4 has a whole bunch of shit on the die including a graphics accelerator, multimedia decoder (capable of 1080p), an image processor, and two Arm Cortex-A9s runing at 720mhz or 1Ghz each, depending on the model.

http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12842&contentId=53247

Something like this seems like it could run a netbook fairly well. The touchbook is using an OMAP3 chip already and supposedly it's fairly fast because everything is optimized for it.

The Tegra is an odd one to pick if you want to talk about cool things happening in ARM development considering it A. Hasn't shipped unit 1 and B. Is actually behind the other high-performance ARM SoCs on the market like TI's OMAP3 line, Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Freescale's i.MX5 series.

If we want to talk about cool, unreleased things, though, TI's OMAP36x and OMAP4 SoCs blow the Tegra clear out of the water.

Or, how about something that's actually being used in devices that are on the market right now (and isn't using an old, slow ARM11)?

Some ARM chips these days go far beyond what one would expect from a RISC micro-controller.

Two great examples are the BeagleBoard, which also uses the same hardware as the OpenPandora gaming platform. Both of the aformentioned devices are running a fully open-source Linux-powered stack, complete with a fully-functional Desktop environment. For developers, you can program for these devices using the standar GNU tools (c,c++), and of course several JavaVM's are already ported to the OMAP (JamVM,OpenJDK,Kaffee,etc)

.

The TI OMAP 3530 chip that powers the BeagleBoard and OpenPandora has a 3D graphics acceleration unit, a 2D (video) graphics acceleration unit, and a built in DSP for audio and general-purpose number crunching.

Without question a large majority of users do little more with their mobile computers than browse the internet, write email, and occasionally stream video - all things that are fully achievable with today's ARM chips.

ARM chip manufacturers are also starting to put multi-core chips on the market, and while the transistor complexity is nothing like Intel's out-of-order logic, multi-core, still means serious multi-threading. With clock frequencies approaching and exceeding 1GHz, I would not be surprised to see ARM take over the mobile and netbook markets, especially considering how little power they actually consume.

Furthermore, even high-end x86 laptops could benefit from having an ARM co-processor for instant-on and mobile operation, while the x86 processor could be used for more compute-intensive applications such as CAD or video processing. Imagine battery power extended by a factor of ten for everyone!

YouTube Videos:
BeagleBoard
OpenPandora

Look if i'm going to get a laptop that uses ARM i'm not going to be able to run it off a small solar panel. I'm going to have to have a battery and charge it regularly, just not quite as regularly as an x86. If i'm going to be doing that i may as well just get an x86.

I'd like to see a laptop maker go to the extreme. eg. Try taking an MSP430 CPU and put it into a small laptop with a big passive LCD and a nice keyboard.
http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/msp430f5437.html

Stats
Ultralow Power Consumption

* Active Mode (AM): 165 ÂA/MHz at 8 MHz
* Standby Mode (LPM3 RTC Mode): 2.60 ÂA
* Off Mode (LPM4 RAM Retention): 1.69 ÂA
* Shutdown Mode (LPM5): 0.1 ÂA

Yes that's microamps (@1.8-3.6V). Basically it could run off a small solar panel like your calculator does. The CPU runs at up to 18Mhz. This is more than enough for the word processors and tools we used years ago.

In my opinion this kind of thing above is exactly what the OLPC should have been. It would cost 10's of dollars and is exactly what we in the Western world has to learn on years ago.

I have one of there 20 dollar dev kits. It fits on a USB stick. The processor is insanely small.

http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/ez430-f2013.html

Unfortunately the tiny add on boards that you can buy extra have a dumbed down version of the one included with the stick.

Unfortunately it does not play at all well with linux.

I have also pondered the idea of building a low tech computer just to see how much could be done on something that would bring the term 'low power' back down to Model 100 levels and perhaps even finally surpass 1980's tech.

Check out TI's MSP430 series... About a quarter milliamp per MIP... the fastest one they sell should then draw about 6 mA, probably less than the power indicator will draw.

http://focus.ti.com/mcu/docs/mcuprodoverview.tsp?sectionId=95&tabId=140&familyId=342

There are PICs and others that are about as good.

The OMAP 3430 contains an ARM core as well as a lot of support functions, including hardware support for most video formats, image processing and also, as mentioned, OpenGL. Check out the link for an overview.

Yes the OMAP integrates several units (including the SGX GPU) that would have, a couple of years ago, been in separate packages on the MOBO. Just because they are now integrated onto the die doesn't mean that they are part of the CPU.

I guess you meant GPU rather than CPU. 8-D

No, actually he didn't, he ment what he wrote.

The OMAP 3430 contains an ARM core as well as a lot of support functions, including hardware support for most video formats, image processing and also, as mentioned, OpenGL. Check out the link for an overview.

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html

The omap3530 can do HD, and it's not even an Intel processor, it's an ARM, so the power savings are enormous.

http://openpandora.org/

This device will be able to play HD in about the size of a DS lite. It's not out yet however.

http://beagleboard.org/hardware Right now, you can buy a beagle board which will do mostly the same thing, except not in a real handheld.

Well, RAM is a TI issue

Kind of. There are two ways of connecting RAM to an OMAP. One is on a chip that clips on top - currently these only go up to 128MB. The other way is to run traces from the CPU elsewhere on the motherboard and put RAM chips there. The OMAP chips support more RAM this way, but it drives up size and moterboard complexity / cost.

as for HDMI the BeagleBoard has one

Yup, but it doesn't have a separate LCD driver. Not sure if this is related.

isn't the BB cortex a9?

Nope, it's an OMAP3 series, which is a Cortex A8 with a load of extra stuff on die.