Lpc2000

One thing I find troublesome about the Atmel AT91SAM7Sxx:

There is no guaranteed external Reset pin.

If URSTEN in RSTC_MR is set to 0, asserting NRST will not generate a 
reset.

Hence, I cannot have a hardware reset button which will guarantee 
recovery from any type of possible catastrophic software crash 
(unless I want to actualy remove power from the chip).


--- In lpc2000@yahoogroups.com, "Eric Engler" <englere.geo@y...> 
wrote:
> This is the best comparison I've seen of these popular families. I 
> didn't see you mention Ethernet but maybe that's not a concern for 
you.
> 
> The AT91SAM7X256 should be out by now and that looks great - you 
might 
> want to look at it.
> 
> One issue that concerns me: there's an open source downloader to 
> program flash on Philips devices, but nothing like that exists for 
the 
> Atmel devices yet. As I understand it (someone correct me if I'm 
> wrong), there's no linux downloader (of any kind) for SAM-BA, and 
> there's no commandline downloader for Windows. 
> 
> Commandline downloaders are convenient to use with various IDEs 
that 
> don't have built-in JTAG support. An open source downloader gives 
us 
> IDE authors a good example of how to integrate support for it into 
> IDEs.
> 
> I didn't check to see if Atmel fully documented the SAM-BA API, but 
it 
> seems like its closed. They also didn't seem to publish the API for 
> their DLL either. Or maybe this stuff is documented somewhere, or 
> maybe it will be soon. Atmel seems like a fairly open company so 
I'm a 
> little confused about this.
> 
> However, it's also fair to point out that Philips does not support 
> programming flash over USB at all (you could roll your own code, of 
> course). but Atmel does (if you can make use of their Windows GUI 
> program).
> 
> Eric