Highly Anticipated 32-bit "Due" due When?

EDIT: 14 and change days from this post. I had mistaken days for hours.

http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2012/index.html

The MF site says 14 days to go, starts on the 29th.


Rob

While everybody is waiting for the Due, You could back this project on kick starter
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kuy/galago-make-things-better?ref=category

Doesn't look like he needs much help now :slight_smile:

Nice board.


Rob

Yea, it's already completely funded, but its still a good ARM-3 board

Any first person accounts of this Due presentation?
http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/9584

They announced the Due will be released on Oct. 22. There will be an updated IDE to support the Due and all of the other Arduino boards. The announcement said the IDE will make it much easier to support new tool chains and thus add support for new hardware going forward. Not a lot of detail yet. There will also be a new program called " Arduino at Heart" to be something like the Intel Inside program. It's to allow products to show they are using Arduino at the heart of there product.

I was kind of hoping they would use a seperate IDE to support the Due rather then shoehorn it into the 8 bit IDE, and therfore subject us 8 bit users to all the new bugs and 'features' the new intergated IDE will surely have.
"Aduino at Heart", sounds kind of corny to me, but I never did understand the marketing side of this business.

Lefty

Provided the new IDE will sit alongside the older versions, as they do now, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

(also, this is supposed to be using the same structure that has been used in ChipKit (PIC32) for a while now, and more recently for Teensy3. The Arduino IDE has been moving toward this multi-platform capability rather gradually, and I wouldn't expect any major problems.) (Though some people rightfully complain about the increased size of the download...)

Did they announce the important details yet (price, what Arm chip is used as the base, what is the clock speed, what is the power draw, how much memory does it have, how many digital/analog/pwm pins exist)? I would have expected arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware/ to have a new entry for the Due within minutes of the announcement being over.

Well it's been a day now and not a single hard fact, screen shot of an IDE, or anything. So we are still none the wiser, what was the point of the talk at the MF?


Rob

westfw:
(also, this is supposed to be using the same structure that has been used in ChipKit (PIC32) for a while now, and more recently for Teensy3.

Actually, for Teensy 3.0 I've been using the 1.0.1 IDE with only very minor tweaks, mostly adding options to boards.txt to change things like "avr-gcc" to to "arm-none-eabi-gcc" and extra options to be given to the compiler and an option specify the toolchain base path. Then I just put a generic arm-none-eabi toolchain in hardware/tools. If anyone's interested to see that modified IDE code, or the ARM-specific core library, just ask.

When they do release another IDE, of course I intend to add support for it.

MichaelMeissner:
Did they announce the important details yet (price, what Arm chip is used as the base, what is the clock speed, what is the power draw, how much memory does it have, how many digital/analog/pwm pins exist)?

The beta test boards given to various developers several months ago had the SAM3X8E chip. Shortly after the Maker Faire in San Mateo, many detailed photos appeared online. Here's a link:

http://robotgrrl.com/blog/2012/05/25/arduino-due-up-close-pics/

The SAM3X8E is pretty amazing piece of silicon. It has about 100 I/O pins (presumably 86 will come to the Mega-form-factor locations), 512k flash, 96k ram, high-speed USB, a fast 12 bit A/D, 2 channel D/A, ethernet mac, and an incredible number of other built-in peripherals. The A/D has 15 channels. There appear to be many PWM pins, some from timers, some from a dedicated PWM generator. The ARM core speed is 84 MHz. The datasheet has some power consumption info on page 1399... basically 76 mA with the core at 1.8 volts, running in the fastest mode.

Of course, this is merely from the chip that was on those boards months ago, not any recent info, but it seems unlikely they'd switch to another chip at this late stage.

Arduino Due is going to be a pretty awesome piece of hardware!

Paul is correct. If I heard correctly, the SAM3X8E is the chip on the Due.

They said it would sell for 49 USD.

It is being shipped to all the regular distributors, so that it will be available to buy on Oct. 22

They said the cause of delay was the wait for the availability of the chip.

LOL, that's the exact same cause for my delays on Teensy 3.0!

Yes the SAM3X8E is a good-looking chip, they did change once before (from the 3U IIRC) but I doubt that would have happened again. I've been looking at the X8E since those photos appeared.

So we do know the chip being used, but nothing else. So apart form giving us a date, something that could be done on a blog or even here on the forum, what was the point of the presentation?

Anyone see it that can explain what was explained?


Rob

I wasn't there. I'd like to go to the NY Maker Faire, but it just isn't in my limited budget.

But I do understand the need to keep the details quiet until official release. Just take a look at what happened with Leonardo. They published (buggy beta) bootloader source and the core with the pin mapping info in October 2010. That said publicly that Leonardo wasn't ready, but pretty soon many people created boards using that info. Most just published photos, cad files, etc, but some started selling them. It wasn't just a matter of a few hobbyists selling a couple extra boards they made. One of those "people" was Sparkfun. Several months before Leonardo released, Sparkfun sold many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of their "Pro Micro" board, at $25 each, using the buggy bootloader (where the only engineering work on Sparkfun's part was a PCB layout and changing the vendor ID number) and instructed their users to uncomment the lines in boards.txt.

I can also personally identify with trying to balance the desire to inform people vs overly hyping "vapor" products. Even though it's probably profitable to push vaporware, I believe Massimo is a genuinely good person whose actions are guided more by ethics than money. He's had a pretty good history of guiding Arduino in a direction that's good for the community over the long-term, even if the short-term wait for products isn't fun.

It's also got to be a LOT of work running Arduino. Even just PJRC's day-to-day operation gets to be overwhelming at times (believe me, I definitely know that), and Teensy's usage is only a very tiny fraction of Arduino's. I know I've planned to do all sorts of things, but sometimes fallen far short of my goals, simply from a lack of time. Despite their incredible popularity, Arduino isn't a huge corporation. I'm sure it gets very, very busy.

Once it's released, this painful waiting and wondering will probably become a distant memory.

Arduino Due is going to be pretty awesome.

Well, if only they had some sort of blog to post the details they talked about, then people who weren't at the NYC Maker Faire would have a chance to learn about it as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

Far-seeker:
Well, if only they had some sort of blog to post the details they talked about, then people who weren't at the NYC Maker Faire would have a chance to learn about it as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

I dunno, I think it is still vapour-ware. To my way of thinking, an announced product would have specs, pictures, etc. on the company's website. And the companies with even more of a clue will mention the MSRP in the announcements, publish it to the electronics press, and work with distributors so that immediately after the announcement, you can pre-order it. Maybe on October 22nd, it will be a fully announced product, or maybe not. Even if it is announced, we will see what the initial availability is (hopefully better than Raspberry-pi, but who knows).

MichaelMeissner:
Maybe on October 22nd, it will be a fully announced product, or maybe not. Even if it is announced, we will see what the initial availability is (hopefully better than Raspberry-pi, but who knows).

Its already been announced. In fact the reason it isn't out for purchase right now is because they are preparing for a release and the ARM chip that it uses isn't very widely avaliable right now. They said that it WILL be out for purchase on the 22nd. I don't see how you can still think its vaporware.