The TI Stellaris Lanchpad

11/05/2026

Recently, I’ve been going through my collection of microcontroller boards and
attempting to program them in assembly language.
Looking for another ARM device I came across this TI Stellaris Launchpad.
This was a follow-up to the MSP 430 Launchpad released in 2010 for the
amazingly low price of $4.30. It was a really nice platform except for the fact
that it had a very limited 14pin microcontroller included. But for $4.30 I grabbed a couple of them.
Around that time I came across a posting for a contest to win an add-on board.
I entered some simple code and won a circuitio Launchpad Educational Booster Pack!
This was similar to the Arduino "shields" and came with a 16x2 LCD, speaker, RGB LED,
potentiometer, microphone and an accelerometer. 

Jump forward to 2012 with the introduction of the Stellaris Launchpad offered for only $4.99.
This board came with an LM4F120H5QR 64pin ARM M4 microcontroller with 256K flash
and 32K SRAM running at 80MHz. (back in 2012 that was amazing for 5 bucks)

You might not find much online about this chip as it was quickly discontinued and replaced
with the Tiva-C series of chips. The Tiva TM4C1233H6PM is an exact replacement.

Having located a sample assembly code, makefile and linker script example for the Tiva-C
I was quickly able to get an LED blinking. From there it was just a matter of time before
I had serial I/O up and running and had interfaced it with a couple of my LCD modules.

I’m using the open-source GCC ARM compiler package from the command line.

I’ve included a couple of example projects. blink0.zip is the most basic example and
uart04.zip contains more complex code with the processor running at the full 80MHZ.

You can download the LM Flash Programmer utility from here:
https://www.ti.com/tool/LMFLASHPROGRAMMER#downloads

Description of download links:
blink0.zip very simple ARM assembly project
uart04.zip                        More advanced ARM assembly project
uart_EBPLCD4.zip Demonstrates how to drive the booster pack 16x2 LCD, beep and blink the LEDs