Introduction

Texas Instruments (TI) is also building ARM Cortex-M4 processors, this board has the LM4F232 on it. One of the interesting things about TI’s versions is that they are more skewed toward the sensor role, building on DSP features in the Cortex-M4 TI seems to be pointing these offerings at the automotive market.

The Board

The TI EKS-LM4F232 evaluation board.

From the image you can see the basic layout of this board. Reading through the User’s Guide can be helpful here. The thing that confused me initially about this board is that there are two USB connections, the one on the left is a ‘mini’ USB and the one on the bottom is a ‘micro’ USB connector. The left one connects to a captive Cortex M3 (LM3S3601) which has a proprietary sort of debug thing going on. The bottom one connects to the native USB-OTG port of the Stellaris part. In a number of the TI demos they use the lower one for a serial console.

Other Features and Specs

This is generally targeted at motion control so there are a bazillion PWM ports (up to 16) and dual quadrature encoder inputs (so you could easily control two brushless motors with this bad boy.)