Jeffrey's Log

LPC2148 (ARM 7) Test bench setup

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This is my LPC2148 (ARM 7) test bench setup.

The LPC2148 header board was bought from Rhydo Labz. You cannot directly power up and start to use. It lacks communication interface. To flash the controller, you need a serial port or a JTAG port. Since this board doesn’t have these port connectors, you need to solder them. So it might be hard for a newbie.

Instead of this board, you can try the BlueBoard which has all the port connectors. I will recommend this for a newbie. I hope that board is worth for its price.

The next thing which you need is a power supply to power the board. You can build your own power supply (If someone needs to know how to build a power supply, I will write a tutorial. But please put a comment in this post saying that you need the tutorial.) ,or you can buy 5V DC power supply (adapters).

Once the board is powered up, it can start to execute your code in its memory. But a fresh controller wont be having any code in its memory to execute. You need a programmer to load the code into its memory. But the LPC series controllers have built-in serial boot-loaders. These boot-loaders can get the code from the serial port and write into its flash memory. So you don’t need a programmer.

To program the controller using the serial boot-loader, you just need to connect the controller to the host PC and the host PC needs to run a serial programmer software. You can get a lot of serial programmer software for LPC controllers. Some of them are

So thats all. Power up the board and connect the serial port to the controller. Run the serial programmer software in the PC. You controller will execute the code flashed into its memory.

But wait. From where you can get the hex file to flash into its memory? Its simple. You just need a cross-compiler. To the cross-compiler, you just need to feed your C source file. It will compile and give you *.out files, which later can be converted into *.hex files.

I will soon try to post a wiki page about how to compile and flash the code into the memory.