'Watch this space tomorrow'... :-)

Until the future is now. :)

But right as I was typing this (or rather, somewhen since I opend the last bunch of tabs in teh browser for reading/answering) it has changed.

Seems like tomorrow has turned into today just a few minutes ago.

Looks like the ad came from Bangkog. (If I interpreted the table right, there should be around midnight now, but I might be a few hours off due to summer time)

I think 50% discount for BoosterPack is a much better banner.

I have just bought one. :>

Hey! I'm not crazy! You are all witness that it stayed there at least three days!!! :-)

Andrea

Andrea Bioli said:

Hey! I'm not crazy! You are all witness that it stayed there at least three days!!! :-)

Yes, I've seen it too. But depending on where you put the dateline, it might have been only two days. :)

But maybe your post was reminding someone that he forgot to press the upload button for the change :)

Mikolaj Filar said:

I think 50% discount for BoosterPack is a much better banner.

It's a nice thingy. And with 50% discount, it fits better to the LaunchPad which gives way more bang for the buck at the original prices.
However, I prefer to use the lifetime 100% discount code I won last year. (not that I used it much since). Surprisingly a 100% discount is more than twice of a 50% discount. One of the cases where normal math fails :)

I know it's a little bit OT, but I would like to hear from some expert (Jens-Michael? :-) ) what are his considerations about the new Piccolo Launchpad: from the hobbyist point of view, but even for the professional...

Is it possible? :-)

Andrea

Jens-Michael Gross said:

However, I prefer to use the lifetime 100% discount code I won last year. (not that I used it much since).

I would prefer to use it too :)

Andrea Bioli said:

I know it's a little bit OT, but I would like to hear from some expert (Jens-Michael? :-) ) what are his considerations about the new Piccolo Launchpad: from the hobbyist point of view, but even for the professional...

Is it possible? :-)

I am not an expert but I also have thought about Piccolos. On the website there is an info the starting price for F2802x is $1.85 (1ku), but distributor's prices start from ~$3 (1ku). It means a price of single MCU is above $6 or $7. There isn' t a lot of models and quantity of peripherals doesn't shock. One advantage I have noted: not limited CCS for free.

I prefer to use ARM or DSP if I need to process signal data: more I/O, peripherals and better performance with the price of Piccolo.

Maybe power consumption is lower for Piccolo? I didn't check that.

Mikolaj Filar said:

Maybe power consumption is lower for Piccolo? I didn't check that.

The F2802x requires more than 10mA's during "IDLE" and +3mA's during "STANDBY", which is a bit higher than similarly spec'd Cortex-M3, and certainly nowhere near the MSP430 :)

However, from what little I've gathered by skimming through the manuals and datasheets, the architecture appears to have single-cycle access for SRAM and certain peripherals. Not in the sense of "single" cycle load-store on the ARM, but more like the register-memory model of the MSP430, with a lot less orthogonality of course.

Also I'm a bit intrigued by this "Control Law Accelerator" thing available on some higher Piccolos, which is an independently programmable floating-point co-processor with its own code and data bus, as well as direct access to some peripherals. Interesting way to implement Asymmetrical Multiprocessing, but it does create quite a bit of complexity during development; I suppose it would be most useful in a very domain-specific setting.

Tony

Yes, maybe the most appropriate words are just your last: 'domain-specific'.

Or when the processing power needs make the difference...

Other than that, maybe it's better to stick to the MSP430... I'm falling in love with this chip! :-)

Andrea