Boards/Backplanes
Low-cost ColdFire development board with integral GCC compiler
The P&E DEV5213CF development board, now available from Computer Solutions, is an ideal low-cost evaluation kit for developers of projects using the ColdFire MCF5213 processor. Despite the low cost of only £80, the board comes complete with a development package including a GCC compiler, making it equally useful as a development platform or as an introduction to any ColdFire processor or to the GCC compiler.
The Other features of the DEV5213CF development board include RS232 transceivers for the processor’s on-chip serial ports, plus built-in circuitry that allows a user to provide a clock to the target from an 8 MHz crystal or an external oscillator. The board may be powered from the USB interface or from a separate power supply. Headers containing all the processor’s pins are individually labelled for easy access, and a through-hole development area is provided for SOIC and TSSOP packages.
A starter edition of the PKGCFZPRO software development package is included with the board and provides the capability to compile, debug, and flash-program up to 64 kbyte of user ‘C’ code. It includes an in-circuit debugger, flash programmer, and the WinIDE integrated environment with built-in GCC compiler. A sample project acts as a template to aid users in developing their own interrupt-driven firmware.
An upgrade to the full version of the software, PKGCFZ_PRO, allows an unlimited amount of user code to be compiled, debugged, and flash-programmed into the target processor. The full edition is also supplied with an assembler and assembly templates to support a wider range of hardware and memory configurations plus an automated version of the flash programmer which allows production programming according to a script file.