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New Hercules LaunchPads


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TI today announced two new LaunchPads for their Hercules line of MCUs:

http://newscenter.ti.com/2013-07-24-Texas-Instruments-introduces-Hercules-LaunchPad-enabling-designers-to-evaluate-TIs-Hercules-MCUs-safety-features-for-less-than-20

 

Hercules MCU (Dual core ARM Cortex R4), running at 80/100MHz, 384KB flash, 32KB RAM

http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/hercules.html

 

$20 apiece seems a good deal, given that even the USB stick dev boards for these chips cost $79.

 

xhercules-spin-image.png.pagespeed.ic._x

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What would be, in general, an ARM R series compare to the M series?

 

I know M is for MCU, A is for application, R is for real-time. From an embedded programmer's perspective, what has a R core offer? More IOs, more timers?

 

Anyone know? I am interested to learn.

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@@cde @@simpleavr re differences

 

More RAM (12-32KB vs. 32-256KB), more flash (32KB-256KB vs. 256KB-3MB), more speed (80 vs. 80-220MHz, single vs. dual core)

http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/arm/overview.page

 

But I guess the big differentiator is compliance with various industry, medical, automotive standards (not really relevant to hobbyists).

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I think the dual cores are meant to run in lock-step, for redundancy & accuracy-checking purposes.  Also has ECC (error correction) for its flash & SRAM.  Probably massive overkill for the vast majority of applications but when you want that extra bit of assurance that your MCU application will WORK, (basically) no matter what (firmware bugs notwithstanding)... sounds like this is a good choice for the job.  Design an electric car's control systems around something like this.  It adds extra measures to help dial out hardware externality-induced failure modes.  I think the temperature tolerances are wider too, so this is immediately useful for extreme temperature applications.

 

I'm guessing not too many hobbyists will have immediate uses for these features, but if anyone does it will make for a very fascinating hackaday article :smile:

 

If Iron Man used a TI microcontroller for his suit, this would probably be it....

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