Projected Capacitive Touch panels added to MPU starter kit

A Debian Linux operating system installation on a bootable SD card or downloadable or free is ensuring immediate operation of the starter kit.

A controller for projected capacitive touch (PCT) panels was added to the most recent board revision. Therefore the new version of the nanoRISC starter kit comes with such a touch function for the 7in display, enabling user-friendly iPhone-style user interfaces now being increasingly found in industrial applications.

Along with the starter kit, the user can choose the 70 x 50mm nanoRISC module from the MSC NANORISC-AM335x family from MSC. These boards are based on the Texas Instruments AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The nanoRISC module with AM3352 clocked at 300MHz offers a 1.7W low power consumption. Besides this economic entry-level module, the AM3354 CPU board with 800MHz clock provides hardware 3D graphics acceleration. This more powerful nanoRISC module consumes less than 2W of power and can also be operated without any cooling.

The NANORISC-AM335x family of processor modules can hold up to 512Mbyte of DDR3 DRAM, up to 512Mbyte of SLC NAND Flash and optionally up to 64Gbyte eMMC Flash. The boards provide popular embedded I/O signals such as Ethernet, USB, CAN, UART, SPI, I2C and I2S audio and support direct LCD drive (16/18/24 bit RGB) at a resolution of up to HD

(1366 x 768 pixels). Further options include a versatile Programmable Realtime Unit (PRU) allowing fast response to real-time events and Industrial Ethernet for industrial field bus applications.

MSC provides Board Support Packages (BSPs) for Linux and Android as well as boot loader and drivers for these operating system (OS) implementations.