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[Reply #15 on:]

.. too many options may kill a man..
What about a few Mbytes of sram (or psram) connected via FSMC ? - this allows us to run much bigger stuff on it and it decreases the number of the free lines by ~45  .
There are several offerings for a PSRAM (SDRAM with internal refresh) up to 128Mbit today, however mostly in BGA54 or BGA48. There are a few Cypress' srams (ie 1Mx16, 2Mx16) in TSOP48 available too.
It would be a nice designer's challenge to use the BGA packages here, indeed .
P.
PS: For example eLua runs fine on this board and uses full 192kB of internal ram already. eLua can easily incorporate C functions, so maybe the arduino libs as well. It is OO and supports multithreading (coroutines) by default as well. Compiler/interpreter is built in as well as a SDcard support. It can allocate the Lua working space to an external ram easily (it can work with segmented ram space).

[Reply #16 on:]

I noticed someone pointed an RTC to use in a shield with this board.
It already has a 32kHz crystal and internal hardware for RTC support. I mean real hardware specific for the RTC function.

For those that like the Arduino-style programming, there is a port (ok, half one third-built) of the libmaple in http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=1268&page=3. I added a few defines and support for the onboard random number generator.

I'm writing part of the driver for the RTC, but first I need to get some sort of communication since the USB implementation for the libmaple is different than the one in this Discovery board.

What I think would be really great expansion board for this chip is:

- SD card connected in the SDIO port (there are specific bits to access the SD/MMC cards).
- Ethernet interface.
- Separate power supply.
- LCD interface.
- Xbee interface? Or a Xbee explorer/FTDI chip header to communicate with the PC (at least while there isn't an implementation for the USB comms).
- Then of course, the break out from the double row header.

[Reply #17 on:]

Did this idea for a shield die out?

i'm holding out hope.

[Reply #18 on:]

Its sort of on hold.  I got caught up in other stuff.  If there's interest, we can revive it, I can work on it some more after I get my taxes done.  W2 is in, am waiting on some 1099s.  I am not doing anything with my board.

[Reply #19 on:]

No worries. I'd be interested in reviving it in a couple of months. I ordered a couple of the discoveries today as I have so image intensive processing, having an external sram on the shield would be ideal.

[Reply #20 on:]

having an external sram on the shield

The full address/data bus for an external memory is available on 144+ pins versions only..

[Reply #21 on:]

Bummer