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[on:]

Link:CHIPKIT-MAX32

No doubt about it, there are a lot of horses under the hood of that controller. And it claims to be "Arduino compatible".

I'll be getting one as soon as I come up with a project that actually needs that much power.  (And I can convince the wife that I truly need yet another electronic 'gizmo'.)

I can wrap my head around the physical aspects of this board, but what has me a bit perplexed are the IDE choices that the "Arduino Compatible" tag brings with it.

If you can program it using the Arduino IDE, wouldn't that limit you to the 8-bit environment that Arduino was built around? (in regards to added cpu cycles for complex math,added overhead for floating point, etc)

Wouldn't it just be better to use MPLAB from the start?  Or am I totally off base? 





 

[Reply #1 on:]

meh... disregard my Q above. 

I just noticed the following:

Code:

Program using a [b]modified[/b] version of the Arduino IDE, available as a free download for PC, Mac OS, and Linux.

[Reply #2 on:]

I just noticed the following

Heh!  That wasn't there before, and they got some beating over on hack-a-day.
Good for them for updating it and making things clearer!

[Reply #3 on:]

Hmmm.... I just heard about this from another source. But I can see other have gotten here before me.

Still... thinking about getting it. Do not have a project that needs it as such .. yet ...

Well, in the beginning one can just try the IDE, to see how differnet the structure is.

[Reply #4 on:]

And it claims to be "Arduino compatible".

Be careful how much you read into this.  It claims to be compatible with the Arduino hardware.  

The Max32 is the same form factor as the Arduino Mega board and is compatible with standard Arduino shields as well as larger shields for use with the Mega boards.

So in practice you will be using its modified  'Arduino' IDE to generate code for a PIC processor.  You will have a familiar interface and you can reuse your old Arduino shields.

Don

[Reply #5 on:]

Of course it uses another IDE, it must have a compiler for a MIPS processor and not for a AVR Atmega processor, but it as the same libs and if you feed it arduino code it will eat it and spit a nice working hex.

[Reply #6 on:]

Worth checking when the software is actual avalible to look at (5/21/?? stated availability). It's must be flattering for the Arduino founders to see so many other microcontroller companies trying to emulate the look and feel of the Arduino platform. A real complement I would think.

Lefty

[Reply #7 on:]

I ordered one of each model. I've a couple of FPGA development boards from Digilent and they produce good stuff, they said that will start shipping on the 21st.

There is some software available at the Microchip site but I didn't look at it yet.

The PIC32MX is a very nice microcontroller, I do a lot of development with it, not sure if will make sense to even use the "Arduino like" IDE, MPLAB IDE from Microchip is a fairly good IDE and you can download the C32 compiler which after the evaluation period has some limitations. Not sure yet how good the compiler for these boards will look like, also for some applications it may be worth to just get a PIC programmer and bypass the bootloader.

Arduino is becoming a popular quasy-brand, more now that Google is making a lot of noise with the ADK, these are obviously not "Arduino" boards, they share the same pcb layout and pin-out of the regular Arduino boards. It claim to be open software/hardware, you can download the zip with the eagle layout for both boards (4-layer).

I'm thinking about putting together sort of a Ethernet shield based on the Microchip ENC424J600 controller, drop some external FLASH so the Microchip TCP/IP stack can run on these boards.

Cheers

[Reply #8 on:]

Never mind, the links at the Microchip site for the software download still point back to the Digilent product page.

Bummer

[Reply #9 on:]

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

[Reply #10 on:]

For anyone unable to download the Windows version from;

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

Someone just posted an alternate download file which appears to be working.

Cheers.

Peter Anderson

[Reply #11 on:]

lead programmer in the pic32 chipkit/Arduino project

Congrats.  Cool.

Um, is Microchip driving this?  DigilentInc?  Just another volunteer open-source project?
I guess this is the most "politically interesting" development in Arduino-land since Freeduino.
(well, probably MORE interesting than Freeduino, and less political, but it will be interesting to see how things work out.)

I am at Maker fair this weekend if anyone wants to stop by...

Which booth/vendor would that be?  Microchip?

How close is this to being able to use non-gcc compilers?   Seems to me that the ability to use your favorite commercial AVR compiler (perhaps with more complete libraries) has always been "of interest"...

[Reply #12 on:]

..anybody tried to run the mpide under win xp sp3?..

[Reply #13 on:]

I had to download via git, every time I tried to download the Windows version I've got access denied.

[Reply #14 on:]

How close is this to being able to use non-gcc compilers?   Seems to me that the ability to use your favorite commercial AVR compiler (perhaps with more complete libraries) has always been "of interest"...

The new platforms.txt  should work with any command line compiler. The whole idea is to be able to put in any compiler you want. We have not tested with non-gcc compilers but it should work. If you try it out, let me know. All the source is on github and we would gladly help make it work with other compilers.

Mark