Luminary Progress

[neil]

Hi Mark,
  I was looking on Luminary web page , and really impressed at their chips, especially 64k ram, USB and ethernet.

As you know I use the freescale part, and was wondering how the progress of utasker is compared to the freescale? I am still in the developing stage of my project, so changing processor is still possible, even though a bit of a pain in design.

Also, do you know if availability is good for these parts?

Regards
Neil

[mark]

Hi Neil

There will soon be a full release of the Luminary project (presently it is Beta) since there is  a growing interest in the parts.
I don't know much about availability since I haven't used them in any quantity - if you check at http://www.digikey.com you will find that they carry quite a lot of stock so designs and small series should be no problem.

The release will include USB device support (same as the Coldfire state) but there will not be as much peripheral support (ADC driver won't be included in the first release, for example) but the project will continue development to fill in the gaps with time.

I expect to see much greater use of the Luminary parts in 2009 - they have an incredible variety of types to chose from and are very flexible at adding new parts demand for a feature set becomes apparent. The on-line demo has been running a Luminary Ethernet chip for the last 37 days which has proved to be very stable so I also have good confidence in the project. The simulator already supports quite a few different parts and can be easily configured to add new ones as needed.

But don't write off the Freescale chips since they are still hard to beat...

Regards

Mark

[neil]

Hi Mark,
  Thanks for the reply.

I really like the freescale parts, but a  bit dissapointed in how much RAM is available for use even before space is set asside for ethernet buffers. I didnt think at this stage within my project I would be thinking about the RAM space.

Regards
Neil

[neil]

Hi Mark,
  I maybe found the answer to my RAM problem, as I have to have about 2-4k of space for holding results in memory. I found a microchip SPI 32KB ram device. Here is a link incase anyone is interested:

http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/22100B.pdf


Neil