The board itself looks quite sturdy. There's a prototyping region, and all the I/O lines area available as through-hole pads. Not being a fan of soldering things directly onto boards, I'm just going to solder some headers into the holes and then connect wires to the thing with removable plugs, and ignore the prototyping area.
Update: That sturdy-looking board survived being found by my two-year-old godson yesterday, and still works!
Power supply input is 6v from a standard wall-wart plug, positive in the centre, or via a two-pin header. There's a green power LED.
The board has RS232 transceivers for the two serial ports, although it doesn't hook up the modem control lines on the second port. The first port is fully ISP-capable, with reset and P0.14 wired up to the port as expected by the Philips ISP utility.
There are only two buttons - reset and interrupt one (which is also P0.14, the ISP select pin). However, there is a variable resistor hooked up to the analogue input port.
Onboard output is via a row of 8 LEDs hooked up to P1.16 - P1.23
There is a JTAG header for programming and debugging, and a row of pads for attaching a special connector to talk to the embedded trace macrocell.
As well as the two RS232 ports, there are two standard CAN sockets - connected to the LPC2129's CAN ports via bus transceivers.
The CD supplied to me lacked the manual for the board, but it can be downloaded from http://www.keil-compiler.de/MCB2100 - they forgot to include it.
Originally, the page at http://www.keil.com/mcb2100 said the board would feature an Ethernet controller, but this statement has disappeared (after I ordered...) and there was no Ethernet controller on the board. Luckily I wasn't buying it for the Ethernet, but I was privately looking forward to getting a TCP/IP stack running!
The software is an evaluation version of Keil's full ARM suite, documented at http://www.keil.com/arm/ - all this means is that the debugger can only access 16k and you're not allowed to develop commercial applications with the debugger. The compiler is GCC, and as such is totally unencumbered. As far as I can tell you can use it as a nice GCC IDE with no restrictions.
The pertinent features are:
You don't need the USB-JTAG device - it can be told to generate .HEX files which you can then download to the board using the Philips ISP utility (included on the CD). You can't use the debugger on live hardware without the JTAG connection, however.
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