Regrettably, one big disadvantage of the ARM processors for hobbyists is that they are not available in a convenient DIP package. Though they are inexpensive, they are obviously oriented toward consumer electronics and not hobbyists. This said, NXP seems to offer excellent documentation making it relative easy for someone like me to figure out how to use it, especially when one reads over old posts on the Yahoo LPC2000 newsgroup.
Certainly Microchip and Atmel/AVR are very hobbyist friendly and it shows because many hobbyist designs choose to use them. It would be ideal if NXP came out with a DIP40 version of LPC2106, for example, but I am not holding my breath.
If one can buy prefabricated electronics, FBD64 is really not a problem at all. I hope that at some point I can have a board fabbed for this purpose. Having a FBD64 package is only a problem if one is trying to use hobbyist-level tools to assemble a board.
I do not have any current plans to use the CAN bus, but the LPC2119 has CAN peripherals (and the ARM Stamp from Futurlec is less than $30 and has CAN). This has quite a bit more horsepower than a typical 8051, but not everyone needs ARM-level performance for their projects.
Currently I do not have commands in the MiniOnBasic language to implement the one wire protocol, though you might be able to bit-bang this if speed is not an issue. In the future, I would like to get I2C working as well as the match/capture features of the chip. And of course, the source code is available for WinARM is you would like to take a go at it yourself.
For a processor like the LPC2000 handling an IP stack (especially uIP which is very tiny) is no problem and is not much of a consideration when choosing a MAC/PHY chip for this purpose. The SPI interface can transfer up to 20 megabits/sec, which is sufficient for 10base-T ethernet. If I was building a router or a network attached server, I would certainly not choose an ENC28J60 or a Wiznet. But for low speed applications the ENC28J60 is fine. In the future, processors such as the LPC2388 and the Luminary Micro Cortex-M3 have built-in ethernet and therefore would be the best choice because the integration favors a lower cost as well as better performance.
The LPC2000 series is an ARM7TDMI-based processor with some on-board memory (8k to 64k), many parts with a low pin count, and many on-board peripherals include D/A, A/D, PWM, etc.
The LPC3180 is a much meatier processor with ARM9, an external memory interface, and also lots of peripherals. The development kits of this seem to be quite a bit more expensive, and probably more than the average hobbyist needs. Even the ARM7TDMI seems to be a bit overkill given the prevalence of the PIC, but the ARM7TDMI processors are becoming cheap enough to be good alternatives to the PIC and AVR.
I am sure that in some point in the future microcontrollers that can run Linux, especially without any support chips such as external flash or SRAM, will become sufficiently cheap as to make a solution like the MiniOn obsolete. Until then, something that can run in 32K of RAM is helpful I think.
I think that controlling a simple LCD display like the HD44780-based LCDs would be very simple from MiniOnBasic. More complicated displays are also doable, but the transfer of data might be a bit slow bit-banging from MiniOnBasic and therefore might be better suited to adding extra Basic commands in C. One reason I used WinARM is to make it so that the tools are readily available to do this.
One motivation for using the web interface is that the web interface itself can somewhat replace the need for an LCD as long as a computer is available. Certainly LCDs are nice but having a built-in simple interface such as the web is a convenient starting point.
The MiniOn is not intended to replace your oscilloscope or Gumstix. It is intended to basically turn an ARM7TDMI system on chip micrcontroller into a Basic-programmable webserver. There is only 32K of RAM on an LPC2148, which is not even enough to load GRUB, much less the Linux kernel. In this space I have used open-source libraries to place a functional TCP/IP stack, FAT filesystem for SD cards, a full-screen text editor, and a Basic language with a decent number of features. The LPC2148 is typically less than $10 and the ENC28J60 less than $4. Therefore the MiniOn can provide quite a bit of functionality with very few resources and with little money.
And no, it was not solely my intention to plug Olimex or Futurlec boards, but they happen to be some of the cheaper alternatives out there that can run the MiniOn firmware. I hope to have my own board made at some point.
The advantage of the MiniOn is that it allows you prototype your project easily, log data to a flash memory card, and control it remotely through the web.
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Certainly Microchip and Atmel/AVR are very hobbyist friendly and it shows because many hobbyist designs choose to use them. It would be ideal if NXP came out with a DIP40 version of LPC2106, for example, but I am not holding my breath.
If one can buy prefabricated electronics, FBD64 is really not a problem at all. I hope that at some point I can have a board fabbed for this purpose. Having a FBD64 package is only a problem if one is trying to use hobbyist-level tools to assemble a board.
I do not have any current plans to use the CAN bus, but the LPC2119 has CAN peripherals (and the ARM Stamp from Futurlec is less than $30 and has CAN). This has quite a bit more horsepower than a typical 8051, but not everyone needs ARM-level performance for their projects.
Currently I do not have commands in the MiniOnBasic language to implement the one wire protocol, though you might be able to bit-bang this if speed is not an issue. In the future, I would like to get I2C working as well as the match/capture features of the chip. And of course, the source code is available for WinARM is you would like to take a go at it yourself.
For a processor like the LPC2000 handling an IP stack (especially uIP which is very tiny) is no problem and is not much of a consideration when choosing a MAC/PHY chip for this purpose. The SPI interface can transfer up to 20 megabits/sec, which is sufficient for 10base-T ethernet. If I was building a router or a network attached server, I would certainly not choose an ENC28J60 or a Wiznet. But for low speed applications the ENC28J60 is fine. In the future, processors such as the LPC2388 and the Luminary Micro Cortex-M3 have built-in ethernet and therefore would be the best choice because the integration favors a lower cost as well as better performance.
The LPC2000 series is an ARM7TDMI-based processor with some on-board memory (8k to 64k), many parts with a low pin count, and many on-board peripherals include D/A, A/D, PWM, etc. The LPC3180 is a much meatier processor with ARM9, an external memory interface, and also lots of peripherals. The development kits of this seem to be quite a bit more expensive, and probably more than the average hobbyist needs. Even the ARM7TDMI seems to be a bit overkill given the prevalence of the PIC, but the ARM7TDMI processors are becoming cheap enough to be good alternatives to the PIC and AVR. I am sure that in some point in the future microcontrollers that can run Linux, especially without any support chips such as external flash or SRAM, will become sufficiently cheap as to make a solution like the MiniOn obsolete. Until then, something that can run in 32K of RAM is helpful I think.
I think that controlling a simple LCD display like the HD44780-based LCDs would be very simple from MiniOnBasic. More complicated displays are also doable, but the transfer of data might be a bit slow bit-banging from MiniOnBasic and therefore might be better suited to adding extra Basic commands in C. One reason I used WinARM is to make it so that the tools are readily available to do this. One motivation for using the web interface is that the web interface itself can somewhat replace the need for an LCD as long as a computer is available. Certainly LCDs are nice but having a built-in simple interface such as the web is a convenient starting point.
The MiniOn is not intended to replace your oscilloscope or Gumstix. It is intended to basically turn an ARM7TDMI system on chip micrcontroller into a Basic-programmable webserver. There is only 32K of RAM on an LPC2148, which is not even enough to load GRUB, much less the Linux kernel. In this space I have used open-source libraries to place a functional TCP/IP stack, FAT filesystem for SD cards, a full-screen text editor, and a Basic language with a decent number of features. The LPC2148 is typically less than $10 and the ENC28J60 less than $4. Therefore the MiniOn can provide quite a bit of functionality with very few resources and with little money. And no, it was not solely my intention to plug Olimex or Futurlec boards, but they happen to be some of the cheaper alternatives out there that can run the MiniOn firmware. I hope to have my own board made at some point. The advantage of the MiniOn is that it allows you prototype your project easily, log data to a flash memory card, and control it remotely through the web.