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ARM-Based Arduino Competitor At SparkFun
Gibbs-Duhem writes "The LeafLabs Maple, an ARM device designed to be pin compatible with the Arduino, and with a strikingly similar and familiar development environment, has reached a new milestone — being carried by SparkFun. By swapping the popular 'avr-gcc' compiler with CodeSourcery's 'arm-non-eabi-gcc,' LeafLabs manages to provide a nearly identical programming experience to Arduino despite targeting a completely different architecture. Also, while some Arduino shields are incompatible due to certain capabilities being allocated to different pins, several of them are currently supported and there are more to come."
Slightly offtopic, but the naming of the compiler seems strange to me. It indicates that it's not using EABI, but which ABI *is* it using then?
Kinda looks like a mini version of the Beagle Board, fills the gap between 8-bit Arduino and the powerful (but >$100) Beagle.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Almost-compatible, that worked out really well in the PC market years ago.... not.
I think they should just market and develop these things entirely within their own realm (sure, bring along the Arduino 'easy programming' layer), the ARMs have so much more to offer over the AVR Megas (that said, AVR Megas/Tinys are GREAT, use them all the time for our production runs).
Still who knows, maybe it'll work more as a 'bridge' to ease the transition over for people who need more than what the current range of Mega chips can offer, I can just imagine #electronics and #avr being filled now with people going "WTF won't this shit work? Stupid AVR/ARM!" (oh wait, we already get that all the time).
Who cares as long as this gives me a much more powerful hardware at lower prices thanks to the volume shipped of these new things?
Currently a Beagle board costs >100$ while a Seagate Dockstar which has a more powerful hardware costs less than half at the next electronics store.
Dumb it down, and then what? What's next? "We take this Intel i7 and make it compatible with an 8 bit microcontroller! Previously, multi-core 64 bit processors were hard to use to make motors spin and LEDs light up, but NOW"
Seems faintly ridiculous, along the lines of just doing something for the sake of saying we did it, like a manned Moon landing.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. This gives you a fairly powerful (well, 72 MHz) 32-bit processor in a small package, that's quite inexpensive. It's true that the amount of flash memory and RAM is small, although you could probably interface to more flash if you had to. However, what is nice is that the programming is easy, you have large registers, and you can do some fairly serious processing.
If you need less power, you can always just use the original Arduino line, or something even less powerful.
Having more choices and capability available is always a good thing.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Before you ask, this thing has 20 kB of RAM (yes, that's kilo, not mega), still better than the 2 kB of the Arduino but do not think of this as the same ARM that runs in your phone.
And, yes, you can still do quite a lot of stuff in 2 kB of RAM (I created a pretty complicated protocol translator at work with an Arduino that even ran in the old ones with only 1 kB RAM).
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Great! But does it have all the characteristics required to compete with the Arduino?
I've seen only technical bullet points in TFA, and technical bullet points are not the reason why the Arduino matters.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Am I the only one who doesn't get what is this post about? What is Arduino and why is it so important?
While Microchip have produced some amazing new PIC devices, the trouble is for them that in many ways they've lost a lot of market interest. There's plenty of BIG players still using them but on the hobby/enthusiast/learning front they've gone from being "dominators" to "has beens" in a very few short years and now many of the bigger players are moving over as well (the consumer-hobby market devices are now dominated by AVRs).
AVRs with their free development tool chain and sane hardware architecture has won this round. That said, Atmel's God AWFUL distribution policies and ever-steepening prices are starting to push a lot of us small-medium sized production houses to alternatives such as MSP430's, things like Atmel Tiny13A at $1 when a vastly more potent MSP430 is at $0.50 makes a difference over a few hundred builds.
I've got a LeafLabs Maple. And a Cortino. And an ARMimte Pro. They're all ARM processors on an Arduino footprint board.(There's also Xduino, but I haven't tried one.)
The Maple aims to be as Arduino-like as possible; even to the extent that you should eventually be able to copy running code from the Arduino IDE, paste into the very similar Maple IDE, hit compile and upload and you're good. It's not quite there yet, but if you're just developing for the Maple it's nice now.
The Cortino is a much more traditional embedded system. It's got an uploader. (Windows executable only.) And, well, that's it. Find your own compiler and runtime. I think I remember finding that the upload protocol was something standard, but I ended up using OpenOCD and soldering in the JTAG header. One brick wall of a learning curve, but I was so pleased at getting it to blink morse!
The ARMite PRO is the Arduino-footprint offering in a range of boards. They are preloaded with a BASIC interpreter, but solder on a jumper and you can upload via a FTDI USB serial cable. I think it's just the same as the Arduino lilypads.
Fun to play with; I need to get an Xduino now!
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
"Look at this blinking LED! It's a 72MHz processor doing that! HA!"
Its not a PIC24F but there is one (at least) http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,719,895&Prod=CHIPKIT-MAX32 after I find something fairly permanent for my arduino pro mini to do, I might get one.
can we do both at the same time, allowing those highschool kids to play with our stuff, go to school, and then come out knowing our stuff really well? Lets discuss at the next meeting.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Joy, replying to AC.
Today's students/hobby/small-scale producers are tomorrow's big scale/OEM, that's in part how Microchip PICs became so entrenched in the first place.
I would also consider Netduino. It's a bit cheaper and, like the Maple, it is probably capable of doing a lot of the things you're thinking of doing if you feel Arduino is holding your hobby project back. It uses the .NET Micro Framework.
Wait, is this Slashdot?
*Runs*
Given the choice for a bit of microcontroller hacking, I would take the AVR every time over an ARM. The ARM instruction set and processor model is a huge kludge. The AVR's is quite neat and clean. I've designed ARMs into a few chips and I've yet to meet an engineer who has chosen ARM because they liked the ARM, it's always because higher management have brought into the hype. The details suck.
Evil people are out to get you.
http://www.oszoo.org/wiki/index.php/Debian_lenny_arm_small.aj.qcow2.zip
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arm vs armel
Apparently there is some new version of ARM called EABI and instead of breaking compatability, debian decided to go with a whole new 'arch' to support the changes.
'armel' is the 'new arm'. 'arm' is apparently deprecated.
Please see http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ and http://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort
"
nor of my Monster mouse cable
theres an old uhm article about why the C language and/or Unix became popular, i think its called 'Worse is better'.
sounds like some kind of disease...
I want the cheapest thing around that can do some digital audio processing on audio coming in from an electret microphone through an OPamp circuit that I have designed. It has to cost less than $50 including shipping and programming tools.
Your suggestion to buy an 8-bit microcontroller without hardware multipliers is not helpful for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about signal processing.
The Maple board is a couple of beers too expensive, but I will probably buy it anyway. Or maybe I'll get one of the other boards that people have so kindly suggested in the comments. This article, with it's measly 44 comments, has been the most useful Slashdot article in 2011 for me.
Now bugger off and go whine somewhere else!
Er, that product is a PIC that's compatible with Arduino sockets. I'm talking about an ARM that's compatible with PIC sockets. No Arduino anywhere.
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make install -not war
I actually had some conversation yesterday about this [having ARM powering microcontrollers and small embedded].
I don't think this will succeed, and I believe there are a few reasons for it. I also created an "Arduino" clone, based on a different processor, called ZPUino, and although the programming environment, libraries and so on can be nearly the same, specifics to the SoC are always tricky to implement and to provide viable alternatives.
Why standard ARM will not replace Arduino:
* Lack of internal ADC
* Power consumption
* Latencies and jitter in execution path and in memory access path. This is very important.
* Lack of proper GPIO and common Arduino devices (timers, PWM, so on, so on)
* You cannot build one yourself.
Arduino follows the KISS model. Introducing complexity here is not welcomed. Arduino is meant to be used by non-experienced programmers, hardware hobbyists and DIY aficionados.
Why would you use an ARM, with a few megs RAM, a few megs flash, to blink a LED ?
Álvaro
Those big OEMs? They're hiring people with experience developing for microcontrollers. The people who got experience doing 'freetard bobbyist' things are much cheaper than the ones that went on training courses using expensive hardware - and more plentiful. If you can spend a few tens of kilodollars training your team to use an architecture that they've never played with, or use the one that they learned to work with as teenagers and have acquired (largely at their own expense) years of experience working with, which would you pick?
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From the SparcFun page:
In the past, ARM processors were notoriously unfriendly in non-professional environments due to proprietary tool chains and unfamiliar instruction sets. Because of this, they were conspicuously absent from classrooms and hobbyists’ workbenches.
ARM start off in the classroom in form of the Archimedes A3xx, the instruction set is simple and easy to learn, I've always found it very easy to get specs for an ARM chip (at least the ARM part, often combined with another chip on the same silicon, can't speak for the none ARM parts). I learnt the ARM instruction set in 1989 as teenager and pretty much every thing I learnt is still relevant. The
Anyway, long live Acorn Risc Machine!!!! Long live Acorn Risc Machine!!!! Long live Acorn Risc Machine!!!!
M0571y H@rml355.
Thanks. Now to see whether our PIC24F firmware will run or be straightforwardly ported to PIC32.
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make install -not war
While you sound like you might be a troll, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I've not personally ordered anything from SparkFun, but from what I can see their prices are competitive for their products (as long as you buy them directly from SparkFun, and not through an intermediary like Amazon).
Sure, if you have the facilities to manufacture PCBs locally then you may come out cheaper buying the parts yourself. There is no guarantee though due to shipping costs, and not buying the parts in bulk.
However, I've not noticed any price gouging, nor any stolen designs. Perhaps I am missing something.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
yea so does about a half dozen boards
Considering digilent just announced THIS yesterday, ...
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,892&Cat=18
Arduino Uno/Mega compatible, 80mhz, moar pins, on-board ethernet.
$50.
This other thing is crap in comparison.
You can develop for mbed with GCC - it takes regular binaries, and the mbed website walks through how to use alternate toolchains. However, the project was developed in order to reduce the barrier to entry of developing embedded software. It's extremely easy for a novice to get started.
plus
So are the shields incompatible with the Arduino? Or is the ARM device not pin compatible with the Arduino?
ERROR ERROR ERROR DOES NOT COMPUTE ERROR ERROR ....
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Compared to Arduino's Atmel (2,32kB) the Maple STM32/ARM (20, 120kB) has way more RAM and flash (also far more than the TI MSP430 series, while not requiring that much more power). The Maple RET6 gives 64kB SRAM /512kB flash and DACs rather than just PWM for only $10 more than the regular version. A version with FPGA on-board is in development. The Maple Mini which is just 2.02 x 0.72 inches and emulates a 40-pin DIP for breadboarding should be shipping in a few days.
Maples are capable of driving QVGA LCDs, doing modest signal processing (see LeafLabs wiki for a guitar pedal project), controlling motors, doing data-logging and complex control and much more.
While they can be pressed into service for doing traditional computing, microcontrollers are distinguished mainly by their built-in peripherals such as timers, ADC, DAC,sensors, encoders, communications etc. The STM / Cortex devices do very well on this measure, particularly the higher-end parts. The Maple forums are active and helpful; some ongoing topics are on using real-time OSes and interfacing with SD card flash memory.
For a cheaper start to working with the STM ARM chips Mouser carries a rather nice-looking, hackableboard with USB, LCD, blinkenlights, buttons, and capacitive touch sensor slider for just $15.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
You may be interested in the Microtouch. http://www.ladyada.net/products/microtouch/index.html Have a look at the code for the demo programs. https://github.com/rossumur/microtouch
For the Arduino Uno, AFAIK they pay the licensing fee to be an official secondary manufacturer of the device. (They are/were primary manufacturer of Arduino Pro, Arduino Pro Mini, and Arduino Lilypad.)
One soldering iron they sell is the Hakko FX888 for $99. Other suppliers sell it at $80-$100. For example Adafruit Industries sells it at $95. Another is the AOYUE 2900, which they sell at MSRP (~$100). They also sell the AOYUE 2901 at MSRP (~$80). The last iron they sell is cheaper than $45, so I know you are not talking about that.
As for Open Source Hardware, yes it does give anybody permission to make and sell it. That is part of the point. Nevertheless, open source hardware projects like he Arduino are able to capitalize on their trademarks, so places like Sparkfun are willing to pay a reasonable royalty to be able to use the trademark.
Further, Open Souce hardware licenses can require attribution.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524