Electronic – Arm development board with lots of PWMs

armbeagleboarddev-kitpwm

I am looking for a Arm development board for a new project I am working on (64 RGB LED POV Globe). POV globe speed questions
I have lots of experience with the Arduino boards but I would like to take a step up to a more powerful board for this project. Also I have been wanting to play with ARM for a while and this seems like a good project to start on.

Requirements

  • Not insanely expensive, <= $250 preferably
  • Lots of PWM outputs at lest 10 idealy 24
  • Program able by the USB port.
  • 32k of chip memory

Nice to have

  • Ethernet, Not that I would need it for this project but most of my other projects require it.
  • SD card or other persistent storage, Logging, loading of settings files, ect…

The first board I looked in to was the beagleboard as it has a huge community and lots of resources but it does not appear to have any PWM outputs?

Next I looked in to mbed-NXP-LPC1768 from sparkfun
But from as far as I can tell from the spec it only has 6 PWM pins, and I was looking for more of a complete board with power supply, ect..

My question:

  • Suggestions on a Arm development board with lots of PWMs?
  • Am i missing something with the PWMs on the beagleboard? It seems strange that the board would not have any I/O

Best Answer

The OMAP chip used on the Beagleboard does actually have PWM capability, but you will have problems implementing it as there don't seem to be any applications using it. The easiest way to implement a large number of PWMs is to forget the ARM and use an XMOS chip - they are often used to control large numbers of LEDs. Low-cost development boards are available that may be controlled via a USB port. Here is one of their boards being used to control an LED cube. Ethernet support is available on one of their boards.

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