[tdicola]

It looks like a nice 32bit ARM microcontroller, so its great for small projects like talking to sensors, running servos & motors, etc. Compared to other microcontroller platforms like Arduino, this Stellaris chip is much more powerful (32bit vs. 8bit, 80mhz vs. ~16mhz, floating point support, etc.) so perhaps it can even run an embedded linux operating system like the Beagleboard, Rasberry Pi, etc.

If you just want to make an LED flash and play with a couple buttons you don't need anything else--the development board includes everything to hook it up to a computer and program it using Stellaris' software: http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/microcontroller/arm_stellaris/code...

If you're totally new to electronics and microcontrollers, Make magazine has a good book to check out: http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla...

[pietrofmaggi]

This Microcontroller has 256KB FLASH and 32KB RAM, and no external bus... no-way you can run linux on it.

Better use a real-time scheduler like TNKernel[1] or FreeRTOS[2]. BTW FreeRTOS commercial version is included in ROM on some TI Cortex-M MCU.

[1] http://tnkernel.com/ [2] http://www.freertos.org/

[hatcravat]

Are there embedded linux distributions that work without a memory management unit? I ask is because it looks like the Stellaris doesn't have one. The Memory Protection Unit allows the OS/monitor/etc. to limit access to specified regions from unprivileged processes, but it does not appear to have any sort of remapping facility.

[Joeboy]

Apparently you can configure a vanilla linux kernel for mmu-less systems - http://opensrc.sec.samsung.com/

[mvts]

Great, thank you for taking the time to write this.