[size=3]Dear Stellaris® customer,Today, TI has announced the acquisition of Luminary Micro and our Stellaris family of ARM® Cortex™-M3-based microcontrollers. You will continue to have access to our award-winning portfolio of Stellaris microcontrollers and kits, but now from one of the most respected, stable semiconductor providers in the industry. As a part of TI’s expansive microcontroller portfolio, Stellaris customers will benefit from:
[FONT=Arial]Assured continuity of supply with the backing of a global top-three semiconductor supplier with more than 75 years of industry experience
Access to and support from a large direct global sales force, in addition to extensive global distribution access
Ability to pair your Stellaris MCU with the complete signal chain and power management solutions, support, and applications know-how that only TI can offer
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The addition of our Stellaris MCUs combined with TI’s MSP430 and TMS320C2000™ MCUs now gives you one MCU source for almost any application.
Over the next few months, you will see a number of changes to our website as we integrate our solutions with those from TI. We will continue to provide you with excellent products and support during a seamless integration with TI.
It will be interesting to see if the T.I. acquisition has any significant impacts on the Luminary Micro role in FIRST. Texas Instruments was responsible for the founding and creation of the BEST Robotics competition program. They did so after seeing the FIRST program, and deciding that they did not want to follow the FIRST model (although they do cite Woodie Flowers robot competition class at M.I.T. as one of their inspirations). T.I. is still a big supporter of BEST, and it would be reasonable to think that they might consider having Luminary Micro’s support expand to include BEST as well. But will they be able to do both?
My bet/hope is that their great attitude infects the rest of TI. The entire Luminary Team really “got it”, and it is hard to keep that type of enthusiasm down.
Texas Instruments is definitely the biggest supporter of BEST Robotics. Texas Instruments in Houston has been one of our mentor support organizations for the DiscoBots (2587). We have had many meetings with T.I. to expand their involvement with FIRST. Houston has two teams and possibly more that work with Texas Instruments. (#434 and 2587)
T.I. operates mainly from Dallas and Houston, will Luminary Micro stay in Austin ?
An additional interest is to see if Luminary Micro will have an effect on the BEST program. BEST just developed their own programmable robot controller which was implemented system wide in the fall of 2008 and was piloted in San Antonio, Texas in the fall of 2007. I believe that it uses the MSP430… which is a TI product. No autonomous yet in BEST,… programming options limited to the free/open source development environment and no real sensors other than limit switches. Also still limited to a 4 channel RC for the OI.
Cool factor of BEST is to see the McGiver bots made from all wood and plastic:)
I think you mean Botball, which ran of the Charmed Labs Xport Botball Controller. The XBC which used a FPGA plugged into the gameboy game slot. The gameboy provided the CPU power and screen, while the FPGA did fast blob tracking and dealt with all the hardware. Botball moved onto a modified version of the chumby running Linux this year. Hopefully I’m remembering my facts right, but I distinctly remember the reason they moved on to the chumby is because they pretty much ran the used gameboy market out of gameboys…
