Re: Super-low cost Zilog ZNEO dev kit + contest

Dave Boland wrote:
D. wrote:

Hello group,

This is more or less a follow-up to the thread about freebies and cheap development environments. This has already been announced in this group, but I'm not sure if it has been noticed.

To launch their 16-bit ZNEO product, Zilog is offering through Mouser a special "contest kit" for the wallet-bleeding sum of 50$. Considering it includes a full development environment with C compiler, an USB debugging probe and other gizmos, that's a very sweet deal for developpers (especially beginners) on a budget.

And if you feel inclined to work quickly, well you might be able to earn a bit of cash through the aforementionned contest and pay off the fifth mortgage you had to take to buy the dev kit. :)

I'm also working on tracing back the roots of the ZNEO core to the z8000 and z80000 from the available documentation, but that will take an other while before being completed.

Good coding everyone!
Regards,
D.

http://www.zilog.com/zneo/
http://www.mouser.com/search/refine.aspx?Ntt=zneoctk0100kit




PS: What a shameless plug. Zilog, I really hope you took notice of that and I'll be soon finding some parcels on my doorstep! :D

D,

One thing to keep in mind is that they released the eZ80/Acclaim with a lot of similar fanfair. They have both been all but forgotten in favor of the Encore. Technical support is poor (1 wrong answer a day). If this is for fun, then go ahead. If you are serious about a commercial product then you may want to reconsider.

Dave,


Hello Dave,

I couldn't agree more. I've also had to deal with their technical support, and I ended up doubting that I spoke with some human that could understand English...

It's really a pity, as it seems some (technical) people go to great lengths to get things to work correctly, while some other (management, PR, support and such) probably don't care.

For their defense, the eZ80 came out before they went into bankrupcy IIRC, at which point they changed management and tried to clean up their act. I believe they more or less managed in doing so, at the expense of a few product lines. Now the post-bankrupcy CEO has resigned, and they're looking for a new one: who knows where they'll go from there...

Those problems have undoubtly lost them a great deal of reputation and contracts through the years. No-one wants to deal with an unstable company with an unstable product line and poor client support... Again it's really a pity, as they have some nice products!

Even considering all those issues, it's still nice to play around with a clean, orthogonal 16-bits CISC processor in a low-cost dev kit. ;)

Regards,
D.
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