Stellaris Eval Kit box

I now have a TI Stellaris LM3S8962 evaluation kit.  Specs include a 50MHz Cortex M3 core, 64K on chip RAM, 256K on chip flash, 10/100BaseT Ethernet with IEEE-1588 support, CAN, a 128×96 OLED, a virtual serial port (via USB), and JTAG (also via USB).   It’s pretty amazing that a commodity (<$10) MCU is much more powerful than the first personal computers such as the Apple II, Commodore 64, and CP/M systems.  (I’ve always thought it would be interesting to see how CP/M would run on a 50MHz Zilog eZ80, which should be about 200 times faster than a 4MHz Z80).

I like TI’s packaging: they stick everything into the box using two-ring CD-ROM holders.

Unboxing LM3S8962 kit

Below is a picture of the board running an eLua demo program.  eLua is a reduced size version of the Lua scripting language that can run on many MCUs.

eLua on the LM3S8962 kit