Date: 16/12/2010

ARM Cortex processor based development board for $199

Bangalore based Mistral Solutions has announced CraneBoard, $199 costing development board. This board is based on TI's AM35x Sitara ARM Cortex-A8 MPU with features such as Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Controller Area Network (CAN) bus interfaces. Both the PoE and CAN interfaces can be used in industrial applications such as human machine interface (HMI), and CAN is also suitable for automotive applications.

The CraneBoard offers power-over-DC wall adapter, PoE enabled by TI's TPS23750 PoE controller, and USB, which allows for portability. An expansion port allows addition of functionalities such as an LCD panel, along with wireless and audio capabilities and is compatible with other ARM Cortex-A8 open source boards. A complete open source board support package (BSP) for Linux is available from CraneBoard.org.

This CraneBoard is code compatible with other TI ARM Cortex-A8-based devices.

The board with 256MB DDR2 SDRAM and 256MB NAND Flash memory provides simple 4-layer PCB design for users to refer. You can buy this board from DigiKey.

In the price range of $100 to $200 there are multiple options to buy ARM cortex based boards in the market. The vendors offering such boards include ST Microelectronics and NXP semiconductors, who have range of ARM based evaluation boards.

The lowest cost embedded board in the market is from ST Microelectronics, the STM8S-Discovery hardware development kit priced at $7, but it's a 8 bit MCU based.