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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."
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
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.
It's a microprocessor on a small board with digital and analog inputs and outputs, a serial port, easy programmability via USB, easy to use IDE and library of useful functions. The board accepts from 7 to 12V, and has pins that output the input voltage, 5V and 3.3V, which is very convenient.
There are different versions of it, but the pinouts are standarized and it's made in a way that additional modules can be plugged on top of it, to provide functions like storage on SD cards or wifi.
Why is it important? Because it allows people with near zero experience in electronics to make something that works.
You can buy a microcontroller cheaply. But you'll need to spend many hours reading the datasheet, understanding how to hook it up, and how to program it. You'll end up working with a huge mess of wires on a breadboard, and need additional hardware for programming it.
With an Arduino, you plug it into an USB cable and in less than 5 minutes you'll have your blinking LED. From there, you can say, buy a wifi shield and a solar panel shield, simply stack them, hook up for instance a temperature sensor to an analog pin, and with a bit of code you can poll that sensor over wifi.
Projects done with it will likely be much more expensive than strictly necessary, but you'll be able to easily do things that would otherwise need a decent understanding of electronics.