Moving right along...

Off we go again! Got this pretty cool board from Renesas. Has some pretty amazing features and most importantly for a couple of things that I am looking at it has Floating Point! Staying in C++ land I have started reworking the libraries from the Cortex and so far have the GPIO and UART classes going. Had a bit of fun with getting it all to go initially but a software update and it all seemed to come good. How does the precessor stack up? Well it lacks the consistancy of the Cortex as there are 5 UARTS and there are a number of variations in extra features and pin assignment within them. We sill see how the other peripherals stack up as we go... The device does need to have an external Ethernet Phyical Interface but then they did include the rather neat one from National Semiconductor that supports ieee1588 time synchronization modes. The debugging is a bit strange in that it uses a brutalized Segger ARM debugger. A rather cool feature is that it does have two USB ports! The board also has a some rather nice peripheral devices, an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, a rather interesting FLASH memory and a nice little LCD. Got to try and get this one finished...