If you find it hard or costly to get your hands on one of those beautiful development kits on offer these days from just about any company active in the embedded and microcontroller industry, get a train ticket or hitch a ride to the Nuremberg Embedded World show. Negative Logic applies there: you’ll have a hard time to NOT get development kits there and you have to assume a Logic Low state all the time to ward off frontdeskies pushing a kit or two in your hands.

To be honest, my interest in a dev kit from Anaren was the mention of “Broadcom”. You know, the company that got tons of credit from the programmer’s generation for “sponsoring” a million or so fat controller ICs for landing on Eben Upton’s Raspberry Pi boards. Broadcom — the same company previously associated with cheap plastic Internet routers, boring server and IT hardware, and  products for mass production, i.e. OEMs and stuff. Thumbs up to Broadcom.


Anaren’s dev kit is based on Broadcom’s BCM20732 WICED Smart Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module. The BCM20732 is a SoC’ed ARM Cortex M3 so here’s a wicked opportunity for me, an 8-bit guy, to learn some ARM programming. But it gets better still: WICED SMART enables a wireless cable replacement. Through Bluetooth! My favorite short-range radio system.

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