Yet Another Low-Cost Dev Board

Freescale joins the bevy of companies offering low-cost ARM dev boards with the Cortex-M0+ based "Freedom" dev platform.

Based on the Kinetis L series KL1 and KL2 chips, this $12 board offers the usual slew of peripherals, an onboard debugger, and various goodies including USB, an accelerometer, and a tri-color LED. A touch slider is included as well, and the chip supports updating firmware via a simple drag-and-drop USB mass storage interface, which is cool.

Interestingly, Freescale designed the board to be pin-compatible with Arduino shields. This is surprising news from a company that has been known to be very unfriendly to hackers/makers.

So I've got my STM32F0DISCOVERY, my STM32F4DISCOVERY, my LPCXpress board, my Stellaris M4F should be here soon, now there's the Freescale part (that I may or may not order), and I haven't even ordered a Raspberry Pi yet.

How many other low-cost ARM dev boards are there? How are manufacturers going to differentiate their products if this trend continues?

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