Newbie introduction

[Bengt]

I have just got my eys on the ColdFire MCU and maybe someone can give an introduction?

Today I use a medical measuremt platform designed with an AVR ATmega32 as MCU. The benfit of the AVR is low cost, low power, package options, cheap development tools (GCC/ICCAVR, AVRStudio) and good help (AVRfreaks). But the performance is limited and we are looking into more powerful MCU's for some of our application.

The ColdFire have just the analogue circuits we need built in, so we will save a lot of board space even if not using BGA package. This is the main reason that I got interested in ColdFire over other 32 bit MCU's

But how does the ColdFire development environment look like and what cost are the tools?

[angelo_d]

Hi,

mainly, there is th CodeWarrior (free with some limitations) + M$Windows + Viruses/Antiviruses and fast pc that become slow.

Or, (with a little pratice/study) there is, as i am doing, Linux + m68k toolchain, m68k gdb (debugger, see tblcf post here) + the ide you prefer ( i use code::blocks). I am using a usb bdm programmer and all the tools in linux are for free and with no limitations.

regards,

angelo

[Bengt]

I am dependent of MSWindows for other development so if it is Linux it would be under Windows like ubunty or similar.

What about emulator?