@Spork

“The board is also fully compatible with Arduino IDE and libraries”

WOW.. this is pretty sweet.

I kept hoping that the “Netduino” boards would actually become Arduino-compatible (instead of confusingly implying so).

Basically, this is all I really wanted… more powerful hardware in the super friendly Arduino package.

This looks powerful enough to masquerade other hardware… say, providing a SD card bridge for a Commodore 64 or Atari ST. Or maybe you can do Ethernet right off of the pins (no extra hardware necessary?).

Tie this in with the Google accessory API… wow!

dual CAN bus is nice. Has anyone played with one of these? I wonder how “fully compatible” this really is the Arduino IDE and libraries. Seems like a lot of work to port everything to pic32 no? It was certainly a ton of work to port everything over to cortex m3 for the leaflabs Maple board.

i was never a fan of pics … i always loved AVRs and ARMs XD

Please please somebody do this for the analog devices Blackfin. 400Mhz DSP – then we can do some computer vision with these boards too

Well….I’ll play with a Maple from Leaflabs instead….

Awesome. I’m more excited about this because if microchip can support a arduino clone, that means that the pic development tool chain can support it. This is a win. Hopefully they mean support the arduino IDE means on all platforms (linux/mac)

@hekilledmywire

Me too HA!

I have one on the way courtesy of Microchip. Should be here in the next few days. I did not think the official launch was until next Wed.

“The board is also fully compatible with Arduino IDE and libraries”

I didn’t see any evidence that this is actually true. I mean, theoretically PIC32 is supported by gcc so it’s not out of the question, but I didn’t see any downloads, I don’t know of any support by the Arduino IDE for alternate compilers, and a lot of people have discovered that porting libraries isn’t as simple as it would seem (even between AVR families) once you consider the rather large base of rather poorly documented libraries that exist.

It still looks like a pretty sweet board for the price, though. It could certainly give some of the ARM contenders a run for their money.

Did you see there is also a “small” version: http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,892,893&Prod=CHIPKIT-UNO32

Nice EAGLE schematic. I like the way that they split up the PIC32. Also interesting that it still has an FTDI for the USB/Serial converter, considering that microchip offers a competing chip. I guess this is essentially a “leak” and full details will come out closer to the “ship” date of 21-May ?

“The board is also fully compatible with Arduino IDE and libraries”

@westfW is correct, our first question was “is it actually fully compatible with Arduino IDE and libraries”. i think the answer is not yet.

Shame that the ethernet is not on the main board. That would make it a real killer.
But with the very high priced Arduino Mega2560, this was bound to happen. I rather had seen an AVR32, or an ARM. But it works :)

They also have a smaller PIC32 on a slightly different form factor: http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,719,896&Prod=CHIPKIT-UNO32
But it’s much better priced (26$)

So thanks, but I think I’ll pass. The licensing on AVR tools is just so much nicer.

@makomk I don’t think that will be an issue now that Microchip’s new and soon to be released MPLAB X IDE will be cross-platform.

The PIC32 7 series is the buggiest mCU i have ever worked with. I just graduated college as an EE, my senior project was a robot driven by the PIC 32. I found that it had bugs that were unexplainable. For instance i used the SPI peripheral to comm with a gyro, and a PWM to drive an H bridge circuit, sometimes the SPI would turn the PWM off. So it was a guess which peripheral would work. I dont know if it was the PIC 32 starter kit or the chip but too many bugs, I read the errata cover to cover and found nothing. None of my teachers could explain it either.

@ftorama – I’ll play with this UNO clone if it’s $20 cheaper than Leaflabs… And much more powerful than the Arduino version.

Ditto on comments about PIC toolchains – this isn’t even Microchip’s board, it’s Digilent’s. TBD on how well they make it work in the Arduino IDE but if they pull it off, that’s fricken sweet. Seems like those of us who don’t get early samples will find out May 21st…

@Daid

I dont think the pickit will fit onto that 25$ board while either the usb or power cable is attached.

@jimparker
You can actually use mplabx now. The links are easy.
http://www.microchip.com/mplabx
you could also try
http://www.microchip.com/arduino
http://www.microchip.com/android
etc etc

If you havent looked into Microchip , you probably should .

@cgimark

The PIC18F13K22 runs at 64MHz but each instruction needs 4 instruction cycles to excute, so it really runs at 16 MHz. Adding the poor assembler, you’ll see that an ATmega is much more powerful than this

WestfW: all -O2 and higher optimisations, apparently, unless they’ve changed it. (For those not familiar with GCC, those are all standard generic GCC optimisations as far as I can tell.)

@ftorama

You need to look at page 280 of the data sheet. Almost all are 1 instruction cycle except compares which naturally take 2 or 3 cycles depending on the result. Hardware multiplies are 1 cycle as well. Add to that I2c that runs at 16Mbps and it is a hard chip to beat for $2

This product release was under an embargo until May 23rd – OOPS.
Guess i can mention it now on The AmpHour now the cat is out of the bag?

“(Coming 5/21)”
Hmm. For Maker Faire? I see Microchip is a vendor this year. oughta be a lot more interesting than a multi-hundred-dollar “sunspot.” I’ll SO be buying one if there’s a Faire Discount (and there are any left…)

@ftorama
dont forget that 4 cycles give stability and ability to wake up exactly each time

@Roman Dulgarov
Do you know for a fact that the FTDI is completely redundant, and there is absolutely -no- advantage to it?

It may just be that the FTDI enables greater power savings (as little dedicated chips sometimes do vs. processors). Or maybe it’s another technical advantage (freeing up the processor to do more things or have more pins available). Or maybe it was done simply to facilitate a rush to market, by copying as much of the Arduino as possible.

I would wait for a hands-on review before forming any opinion of it being “wasteful”..

(Also, it seems wrong to look at any Arduino through the lens of “wasteful”. It’s a very general purpose board with a lot of stuff added on to make it easily approachable. Relax. :-)

@SpecV Microchip is not the best at up-keeping with their documentation. You may also find in 2-4month that the “default” register values may not be “recommended values” Get into habit of explicitly stating all register values even when they state that there is a default. If you think there is a bug…there probably is. Fix it and don’t waste time waiting on official fix. They are also in a habit of jumping ships. So while PIC32 is the latest fad your in luck. But once they come up with their next “big thing” they will drop PIC32 to back burner. All in all the micro’s are good, biggest issue is lack of good documentation. You’ll resort to combing forum posts for bits of information to get the complete picture.

@Roman Dulgarov –

They probably did it because the entire community freaks any time anything changes. I remember a thread on the Arduino forums where an admin asked why there are always conspiracy theories when they change stuff.

Wow, they managed to combine two crappy things: Arduino and PIC. The world never ceases to amaze.

Well its 8:30 MST. Looks like we are 30 min past the Press Conference Start Time…. Anyone else who was invited not able to connect?

WestfW is correct regarding FTDI. There was too much work to get the ‘background’ USB stack working properly, in the time frame needed, and FTDI was seen as a safe, low risk way to go. Not really anything special about FTDI – other USB to serial chips could easily be used instead.

Having said that, I know that it’s possible to make this work with just a PIC32 – no FTDI needed. I demonstrated it on my UBW32 board (which has no FTDI chip). The big piece left is the PC side of the bootloading process – avrdude does not support FTDIless PIC32 bootloading, so a new tool needs to be put into place for that to happen. Hopefully it will, eventually.

The LeafLabs Maple line boards dont have the additional FTDI chip. It definitely adds a layer of complexity (to have the USB running the background, and dealing with RESET and bootloader effects), but also flexibility – users can control the USB peripheral if they wish. Uno uses a secondary chip to offer configurable USB, which is nice too but adds another chip to the design.

In the end, I think the “use the onboard USB” approach turned out to be much harder than expected, but eventually it has become quite stable.

@Alex – forget all that on a shield. I want a version with all that on the main board! Kind of like the Freetronics Etherten (which looks awesome but is not available in the USA, frustratingly… )

@Will

Would that “pretty awesome”-ness include what I wanted plus Google ADK support and XBee/Bluetooth/Mifi, but with a good and honest price to boot. It’ll be the “Internet of Best Things”. Thanks. :)

Can’t wait for the official press release with more details.

Check out a review at this link: http://themakersworkbench.com/?q=node/421

The spec for Max32 says only 2 SPI available, but the MCU spec says 4 SPI. Nice to have one more though. Else, five I2C and 6 UART with IrDA look good.

Can’t wait to get this with the “awesome” shield.

The software is now ready to download

https://github.com/chipKIT32/chipKIT32-MAX/downloads

All 3 OS versions are ready to go (Mac, Windows, Linux)

As far as how it works, the core files and library files of course have been re-written to use pic32 hardware instead of avr hardware

The ide has been modified to have a platforms.txt in addition to the boards.txt. This allows multiple compilers to be used. The design idea is that any gcc compiler can now be made to work just by adding a text file (platforms.txt) Everything about the compiler is driven by that file.

The biggest difference in what we did compared to what maple did, is now you can select back and forth between AVR and PIC32 without changing programs. Just go up the boards menu and select a different board. Mega2560, Arduino-UNO, chipKit-MAX32 or chipKit-UNO. and click download. Thats all there is to it.

We are calling it MPIDE for Multi-Platform IDE

For anyone that has looked inside of the java ide code, the section that drives the compiler has been COMPLETELY re-written. This was a MAJOR undertaking.

I am at Maker fair this weekend if anyone wants to stop by and see it and learn more how it works

Mark
lead programmer in the pic32 chipkit/Arduino project

The chip using on the larger board includes an Ethernet “Mac”, but it will need a daughter card containing an “Phy” and the magnetics/connector to actually talk to an ethernet. Semiconductor economics being what they are (weird), I can’t see a Phy+connector “shield” being much cheaper than a ENC28J60 (which includes both Mac and Phy) shield. Potentially MUCH faster, though (no SPI bottleneck!)
And a “combo” shield that includes the missing bits of Ethernet + USB host + other stuff might make for an interesting combination…

@makomk – See, it does what I asked. :)

It may not be in the official Arduino tree YET, but suddenly the “Arduino environment” is CPU agnostic. That’s just perfect – people can start with small boards, learn their own platform, and work their way up. Plus, traditional ARM boards tend to be rather expensive… this isn’t.

This is like learning xmas is happening twice this year!

@WestfW

Microchip started the project from the Academics division. They approached Digilent to do the hardware design. Digilent had dealt with me and knew I had the ability to pull off the software side.

Yes, Keith is my twin Brother….

There will be a chipKIT Ethernet shield released sometime in June. The details I have are: Ethernet PHY and transformer, USB OTG, 32 KHz oscillator, 256 Kbit I2C EEPROM, and 2 CAN interfaces

There will also be a Basic I/O shield released around the same time. Details on it are: 4 switches, 4 buttons, I2C™ temperature sensor, 256 Kbit I2C EEPROM, 128×32 OLED display, 4 open drain channels, 1 potentiometer, and 8 LEDs

Yes there is

http://www.chipkit.org/forum/

Following the tradition of having the protoshield PCB available after a new board launch, here is the PCB

and the KIT

solar32

There is a modified version of the Arduino IDE that supports BOTH the ATmega and the PIC32 chips

Many of the libraries such as LCD and Stepper work exactly as is. Libraries that deal directly with the hardware such as Wire(TWI) and SPI have to be re-written, then they will be fully compatible libraries.

Mark

You are much too kind Mark. I would simply have pointed out to solar32 that his comment was false, and and unnecessary actually had he bothered to actually read all the follow-up comments (such as yours, which added those details to the original breaking-news HAD post).

j_jwalrus

I am working on getting the maple compiler chain to work under MPIDE, the compile process is working completely, I have a bug in the link command some place. Once this is working, we should be able to program the maple arm boards directly from MPIDE.

I am going to put documentation to platforms.txt on the wili (www.chipkit.org/wiki)

Mark

I also am working on several other cpu families. If anyone wants to help, let me know and find me gcc compilers for the mac for your favorite cpu.