This morning I got an email from my colleague Jamie Little, who was rather excited (rightfully so) to share some news and requested that I post this in my blog. Jamie manages our Alliances Program and works very closely with our semiconductor partners thus keeping up to date on any new developments in the hardware side of the embedded world. Here is Jamie’s message:
Texas Instruments has recently announced their LaunchPad platform based on the Stellaris Cortex M4 LM4F120 device at an introductory price of $4.99. Now that’s cheap! TI is taking pre-orders and I understand due to high-volumes, the ship date stretches out to November 2nd. 
So what do you get for $4.99? Granted, TI can’t be making much (if any) money on Launch Pad and I’m sure TI expects plenty of orders from students and hobbyist. However, the LaunchPad is a nice piece of starter-hardware to test out an ARM Cortex M4F device – inexpensively. Under the hood, the Stellaris LaunchPad runs a 80MHz ARM Cortex –M4F CPU with 256k Flash/32K SRAM and handful of usable peripherals including UARTs, I2C, SPIs, CAN and even USB.
Coming soon there will be a Nucleus ReadyStart evaluation for the LaunchPad, the small kernel makes it possible for developers to use an RTOS that fits the memory. The TI Stellaris LaunchPad is sold at $4.99/unit, I think we can all agree that price is not an obstacle!
In case you did not know, the Sourcery CodeBench embedded toolchain already supports the Stellaris Cortex M4F family, so you can start using it today to develop and debug applications for the LaunchPad! Get your copy of Sourcery CodeBench.
You can follow my blog for announcements on new support for the LaunchPad or follow us on Twitter.
If you are one of the lucky ones who have managed to get your hands on a LaunchPad already, share your experience with us. Or if you do not have the LaunchPad yet (and dont want to wait until November), you can still tell us what you think inc. how you would use the new board and be entered to win a giveaway – yes, the LaunchPad itself (and some other goodies)!
Until next time, happy debugging!
I am responsible for product marketing of the embedded software design technologies at Mentor Graphics. Prior to this role I spent 10 years marketing Mentor's hardware design products, specifically in the RTL and high-level synthesis domains. Moving from addressing the requirements of hardware designers to those of software designers has been quite the change. Throw in open-source and you have a heady mix - which keeps me on my toes!
Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my family, reading a good book or the occasional round of golf (in the few hours of sunshine we get in Portland!).
I hope you find my thoughts interesting and look forward to your comments.
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