Getting started with NXP LPC1347 (ARM Cortex-M3)

After working on AVR ATmegas for a while, I decided to get back to ARM's.
This blog is intended to be a journal of all the things I encounter on the way.

Out with ATmega (Arduino), in with ARM

I have nothing against Arduino. This picture depicts my general feeling on the state of my hobby at the moment.

Playing around with Arduinos and the ATmega328 (32 kB Flash, 2kB RAM) in particular I got frustrated by the need to have a USB to Serial converter in my projects (i.e. the chip that enables you to connect your Arduino to your PC). I also constantly ran out of program space. Going to "bigger" ATmegas was not an option - ATmega2560 is hugely expensive in my opinion and still doesn't have USB built in.

I set my sights on the LPC1347 because it had the right mix of features for me:

• drag n' drop programming (built-in USB bootloader)
• 64 kB of on-chip Flash
• 12 kB of SRAM
• runs at 72 Mhz
• is 32 bits
• can be programmed on the mbed platform