Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 2:28 pm
As a general rule, you don't. Unless you have all of the equipment and know-how to etch a board, solder the parts on, and want to buy all of the parts individual. You'll have hassles though, most vendors don't like selling one of parts to hobbyists. Which means you'll need to by a kit. I suspect if you had the background/knowledge to do that, this question would not come up. It's not as simple as plugging a chip on a motherboard.bloodhound23 wrote:I'm just wondering how I could aquire an a standalone ARM.
Put it like this - designing and building a board is equivalent to programming your own OS. Even the most basic serial I/O board will take a significant amount of work, time, and headache to bring up. To put that another way, you are essentially asking to buy the engine and transmission to a car, without the rest of the car, in the hopes of manufacturing the body and obtaining all the components to get that car running.
Most of what you get with standard ARM platform is a system on a chip. Which means everything is integrated in the core, and then you have to place all of the outlaying support for that on the board.
I provided you with multiple links to development boards pre-made. If you don't want to go with a development board, you don't want to go with ARM. And frankly, at that point, you are no longer embarking on a software project but a hardware project. If you want to do that - I'd suggest buying a kit. (There's one on the classic page I linked.) And you are going to loose a lot of the abilities you'd have with the ARM.
I provided the buglabs link because that is an easy, extensible set of hardware to build form. Everything they do you can buy off the self, and get schematics/diagrams for. You are not there general target audience, the important note about their product for you is that it supports JTAG - which means you get some very powerful access to the platform.
All those platforms are the closest you'll get to a 'standalone ARM' without doing substantial soldering/component work yourself. Any of them - the dev boards, the kits, etc... - will be able to load your kernel (after you've written it).
Anyone of those links I provided with dev boards will let you do raw programming to that device. The further you venture out into this territory, the more toys you'll need to do it - etching kits, ROM programmers, expensive software, etc...
I want you to die. I want to make you feel pain. I want you to go emo on yourself.