Whenever I end up in Hong Kong and talk to friends there I am generally inspired to work on a few projects of various sorts. Having just finished some travel in China and Hong Kong for work I’ve come up with a good reason to get back to working on the pcb I was designing, but it’s a project that will be better if I can breadboard it out first. I’m hoping to build a small arm system that is smaller than a typical usb stick so that I can more easily do arm work while traveling. As it stands right now, with my typical Olimex LPC board I need 2 mini usb cables to handle both flashing and pulling out UART for a console. That’s on top of the 10 pin connector bridging the daughter board over via UEXT. Unfortunately, breadboarding a 32 pin cortex-m3 is a bit difficult so I imagine the first step will be to design a breakout board for the chip I want to use. Once I create a simple DIP for it and solder it all together I hope to be able to use that to test the other components for the software build before I do a final push for a form factor usb pcb. I’ll also need to write some software to handle passing the UART over to my laptop via USB. That might be a good excuse to play with Go a bit and break out of my C shell, though I’ll have to see if it has libusb support at this time.
Hopefully next update I’ll at least have a schematic up for the DIP board.