ChipKIT Max32, An Arduino Mega Upgrade With A PIC32 Under The Hood

May 12, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 91 Comments

For those of you who are looking to put some power behind your Arduino shields, Digilent just released their chipKIT Max32 prototyping platform. The board features a Pic 32 microcontroller, USB programmer and all the things you would typically expect from a development board.

The PIC32MX795F512 is a 32-bit MIPS processor core running at 80Mhz, 512KB flash memory and packs 128KB of SRAM data memory. Digilent also mentions utilizing the Pic’s built in USB 2 controller, 10/100 Ethernet and dual CAN controllers, but these will require shields specific to the chipKIT Max32. The board is also fully compatible with Arduino IDE and libraries as well as MPLAB and the PICKit3 in-system programmer/debugger.

With a price point just below the Arduino Mega 2560 this looks like a great resource for anyone looking to upgrade their Arduino webserver, or just embarrass their Arduino Arduino shield. Maybe it’ll just spawn some interesting gameduino upgrades. It can certainly cut down on extraneous Arduino usage. Either way we’ll be on the lookout to see what this performance bump can bring to table!

Arduino Helps You Ski Copper

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Dwight’s] been working on a long-term project to add a status board for the ski runs at Copper Mountain ski resort. The board will feature an 8×8 LED module for each run that displays a green O for open trails, a green G for groomed trails, and a red X for closed trails. He’s also got a status board with LEDs embedded in a trail map.

The system relies on SPI for each LED module. An Arduino Mega uses a Xbee module to pull down XML data wirelessly and display it on this board. Since the trail report is already available online it’s just a matter of parsing the data in a useful way.

He’s not quite done with the whole thing yet, but keep an eye out for it if you are planning to ski Copper Mountain.

[via Tom’s Guide]

Arduino MEGA Is Official

March 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 68 Comments

arduinomega

The Arduino MEGA is official and even more expansive than we originally thought. It has 54 digital i/o pins. 14 of those can be PWM outputs. Along with 16 analog inputs and 4 UARTs. It is even compatable with most shields for the Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila.

MEGAshield For Arduino MEGA

March 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

megashield

The folks over at NKC electronics didn’t waste any time with this one. They sent in the MEGA shield for the Arduino MEGA. We just posted the story of the Arduino MEGA yesterday, so that was pretty fast.

Arduino MEGA

March 16, 2009 by Eliot 53 Comments

arduino_mega

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories spotted one of the first images of the Arduino MEGA. The board is based on the ATmega1280 microcontroller, which has 128KB of flash,4KB of RAM, and 4KB of EEPROM. We haven’t seen any official specs yet, but the silkscreen shows 12 PWM connections, 36 Digital I/O, and 16 analog inputs. The post mentions 4 hardware UARTs and an I2C bus as well. No release date yet, but we can assume it’s soon since the hardware was already demoed at ETech.

Related: We added an Arduino category.