The question should not be “What does it do?” but rather “What can it do?”. On its own the Stellaris launchpad doesn’t do anything, except of course blink an LED out of the box. The Launchpad is a place to start that gives you the ability to interface the physical and digital worlds by controlling
When writing code for the Stellaris Launchpad you have two main choices in how you write the code. You can either manipulate control & data registers bit by bit with the Direct Register Access Model. Or you can use a defined set of API’s with a set of predefined options to abstract away the hardware
The LM4F Stellaris Launchpad has a built in ICDI (In Circuit Debug Interface) which means you can program it out of the box with a USB cable and nothing more. In addition, just like the LM3S Dev Kits of yore, it has JTAG breakout pins in a convenient .1″ header size that enable both the
When working with the Stellaris Launchpad it can get confusing which functions are available on which pins. Thus the awesome people over at Energia put together these pinout infographics (https://github.com/energia/Energia/wiki/Hardware). The link also has pinouts for the MSP430 Launchpads. Enjoy! Top Bottom
What is Energia you may ask, well my friend, Energia is a third party app that lets you run Arduino code on a Stellaris Launchpad. It enables you to write code in the most widely known language among the DIY community on a board that is 4 times faster (80Mhz)and 1/3 the cost (13$) of
In the ICDI folder you will find all the drivers you will need for your board. The simplest way to get these installed is to plug in the Stellaris Launchpad (make sure you plug into the “debug” USB port and the switch is flipped to the right) , the automatic windows driver installation will fail,
1) Run the StellarisWare Installer as an admin (right click->run as admin) 2) Click next all the way through 3) Click Finish 4) If the system prompts you click “This Program Installed Correctly” 5) Congrats! You have now Installed StellarisWare, go check it out! (by default its at C:\Stellariware )
NOTE: if at any point you are having trouble or need more specific instructions please view the KEIL Quick start at /Documentation/Quickstart-Eval-Kit-Keil.pdf 0. Download the software from http://www.ti.com/tool/SW-EK-LM4F120XL Unzip the downloaded file Run the KEIL installer called mdk454 in Downloads/EK-LM4F120XL-KEIL-733/Software/Keil/ Say yes to the popup asking for permission to run Click ‘next’ all the way
So, you want to use the Stellaris Launchpad, that’s great! There are a couple of things to get out of the way first. NOTE: This is all assuming that you are installing using Windows, because it’s easier, getting things running on Mac / Linux are somewhat more complicated and guides for those will be coming
NOTE: this example is based on the LM3S1968 board, however the instructions could be easily modified to accomiddate any Stellaris packaged microcontroller by substituting 1968 for whatever board you may be using. Open Code Composer Studio Create New CCS Project File->New->CCS Project Fill in New Project Information NOTE: make sure these settings are correct;
