LPC4330 - Xplorer Review

LPC4330 is cortex M4 device from NXP semiconductors and NGX technologies were one among few board manufacturers who designed a board for LPC4330 controllers. LPC4330 has asymmetric dual core, one cortex M0 and other cortex M4. Both cores have independent program memories.

LPC4330-Xplorer

LPC4330-Xplorer is the board manufactured by NGX Technologies Pvt. Ltd. It costs about 2500 INR($50). This low cost board comes along with two usb cables, one for usb Device and other for usb Host connection. The board has two USB ports, either of them can be used to power up the board. Two user LED's, one user input switch and one Reset switch can be used by user. It has audio in-out capabilities too. User can select different boot modes depending upon the DIP switches. But not all boot combinations are not support. LPC4330-Xplorer has 32MB SPI Quad flash which can be used to store program code. Ethernet connectivity is well supported by this board. The board comes with pre-loaded peripheral test program which can be used to test the capabilities of the boards. The Example codes provided at the NGX Technologies website are good enough to get started with this board. But none of them uses the cortex M0 core. User guide provided is also very precise. But the Reset switch on the board works every alternate time. This is a silicon issue! This board can be used along with Xpresso baseboard by NGX technologies for peripheral extension. The board also has 10-pin cortex debug header which provides the flexibility to debug using LPC link.


Pros:

1. Low cost
2. Asymmetric Dual core
3. Peripheral enriched 

Cons:

1. Reset works every alternate time(Silicon issue) 
2. Debug header is not hobbyist friendly.