Ultra Low Power ARM Evaluation kit

SIM3L 1xx-Evaluation board

I came across this kit from Silicon labs the other day, and rather than just another me-too ARM evaluation board, this one has some very creative features. The BADGER-SiM3L1-EK is about the size of a credit card and what particularly caught my attention was the fact that it runs for up to week from a 1F super-capacitor! You plug it into a USB port and give it a 3-5 minute charge and off you go, even running the LCD – now that’s smooth.

The chip that runs the show is a 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 and this kit neatly demonstrates how low the power consumption can is. It can be quite hard to get figures for how low power these 32-bit chips run and I for one have been a bit sceptical when compared to the latest generation of 8-bit micros. This board very unequivocally shows these are really low power devices and also reminds me of how low power an LCD can be when you take away the driver chips and drive it natively.

These kits come with Silicon Labs free Precision32 IDE and at $30 this could be finding it’s way onto the Spell Foundry bench for a play.

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