I moved sidehack's reply to this thread, because the original thread is going on back-burner.
They are about EUR20 in Europe, about USD18 in the United States.
LPC11U14 is now obsolete, replaced by LPC11U24, which is also soon getting obsoleted. They have a cute break-away debugging sub-circuit. It can be used to debug the included micro-controller or after breaking of can be used to debug an external board with similar compatible NXP micro-controller.
It is also supported by the free version of the LPCXpresso toolchain, no need to pay $500 for the full version. I took a quick look at the Avalon's firmware source posted on Github. They seem to be using Keil's toolchain which is very expensive. Edit: about USD5000, depending on the license details. Edit2: although Keil recently started supplying some free/subset version of their toolchain for very small chips, which I think this one will qualify.
It is going to be a tight on this MCU: 50MHz max clock, 24-32kB FLASH, 2kB RAM, 1 UART, 1 I2C, 2 SPI.
Novak chose an LPC11u23 ARM, which is USB-capable and has a variety of ports and ADCs. It's in the same family as the ARM on the Avalon Nano and Ava6 control board (which I believe is LPC11u14? Going from memory on all these part numbers). I've worked with 8051 programmed from Windows, but not ARM programmed from Linux. He had a Linux toolchain set up, and before he left I believe he shifted it over to one of the general shop machines rather than his own box. I figure on utilizing the USB bootloader supported by the chip, so I can write code to it without requiring extra hardware - that also makes firmware updates in the future more possible.
So, I reckon if someone is pretty good with ARM, and maybe also c for some cgminer drivers, and has time to work on it in the next couple weeks, let me know.
I would guess that Avalon designers had chosen LPC11U14 because of the popularity of Embedded Artists' cheap LPCXpresso development kits. http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/lpcxpressoSo, I reckon if someone is pretty good with ARM, and maybe also c for some cgminer drivers, and has time to work on it in the next couple weeks, let me know.
They are about EUR20 in Europe, about USD18 in the United States.
LPC11U14 is now obsolete, replaced by LPC11U24, which is also soon getting obsoleted. They have a cute break-away debugging sub-circuit. It can be used to debug the included micro-controller or after breaking of can be used to debug an external board with similar compatible NXP micro-controller.
It is also supported by the free version of the LPCXpresso toolchain, no need to pay $500 for the full version. I took a quick look at the Avalon's firmware source posted on Github. They seem to be using Keil's toolchain which is very expensive. Edit: about USD5000, depending on the license details. Edit2: although Keil recently started supplying some free/subset version of their toolchain for very small chips, which I think this one will qualify.
It is going to be a tight on this MCU: 50MHz max clock, 24-32kB FLASH, 2kB RAM, 1 UART, 1 I2C, 2 SPI.