Is Arduino Due coming?

And so the shield compatibility problem begins.

Yep, we live in interesting times.

Brace yourself for a lot of "Is my Due bricked?, all I did was plug in the XYZ shield and now nothing works" questions.

Anyone ever see an official arduino R3 spec?

Someone just asked that on another thread, I said I don't think such a thing exists, at least not available to the public. Who needs documentation when you have the source code and the Eagle design files right :slight_smile:

All the Arduino stuff really should be properly documented. I volunteer someone else to do it.


Rob

Graynomad:

And so the shield compatibility problem begins.

Yep, we live in interesting times.

Brace yourself for a lot of "Is my Due bricked?, all I did was plug in the XYZ shield and now nothing works" questions.

Anyone ever see an official arduino R3 spec?

Someone just asked that on another thread, I said I don't think such a thing exists, at least not available to the public. Who needs documentation when you have the source code and the Eagle design files right :slight_smile:

All the Arduino stuff really should be properly documented. I volunteer someone else to do it.


Rob

Well from the official Uno Rev3 board discription there is this section:

Revision 3 of the board has the following new features:
1.0 pinout: added SDA and SCL pins that are near to the AREF pin and two other new pins placed near to the RESET pin, the IOREF that allow the shields to adapt to the voltage provided from the board. In future, shields will be compatible both with the board that use the AVR, which operate with 5V and with the Arduino Due that operate with 3.3V. The second one is a not connected pin, that is reserved for future purposes.

But again I don't think that is a easy for beginners to understand statement/specification, and therefore the burden now falls on the shield manufacture to now state which arduino boards their shields will work with and which might damage a Due board. People selling Due boards may also have to be pretty specific about what shield types can or cannot be connected to the Due. I would not be happy with the arduino folks if I was in the shield selling business. There are going to unhappy sellers of both shields and Due boards facing newby customers asking for refund or replacements on their newly purchased Due boards.

Lefty

Well from the official Uno Rev3 board discription there is this section:

That's the sort of thing I refer to, it's not a spec, it's a general description.

pins that are near to the AREF pin
Where?

the IOREF that allow the shields to adapt to the voltage provided from the board
How?

AFAIK the only drawings that show the shield dimensions are those produced by users (myself included).

As I said in the other thread, nobody is getting paid to do proper documentation and few people have the time so I guess it will never happen.


Rob

If I was selling shields, I'd be placing big disclaimers on my webpages for each shield

This is a 5V shield! Will NOT work with an Arduino DUE! Tested to work with Arduino Uno, Mega1280, Mega2560, and Leonardo. Connecting this shield to your Due may result in damage to your shield and/or your Due, and will void your warranty!

That should reduce the number of credit card chargebacks by at least 10%. Who needs IOREF? :wink:

More seriously, plugging a board designed for 5V onto a 3.3V board will most likely result in the shield simply not working due to undervoltage, rather than actually harming either the shield or Due. The exception might be the IO shields that require higher current and have their own power in connector, and are designed to supply power via backfeed to dev boards on the Vcc pin. Unless it turns out the Due has some built in protection like a zener circuit or something, the result could be smoky.

Any other specific failure modes anyone can think of?

Edit: OK, just thought of another one myself. If a AVR designed shield tries to draw more current on an IO pin (up to 40mA) than the Due is rated for, more smoke.

Prima facie it would appear the Due itself is much more likely to be damaged than the 5V shield.

Many shields, sensor boards, and external i/o boards that I've seen use
active components that tie into the +5v power pin for their power.
If the +5v power pin on DUE is still +5v (the pictures I've seen so far have it labeled as +5v),
then that means all kinds of shields and devices have the potential to create problems for DUE.

For example, those shields that use +5v and drive any outputs back to
the MCU pins, those outputs will usually be +5v which will be too high for the DUE.

Then there are many devices like TTL Async serial devices, SPI, and I2c devices that also
use 5v for their circuitry and will drive +5v back to MCU input pins.
Then there are sensors, like the popular HC-SR04 ultrasonic ping sensor,
and a slew of "electronic brick" sensors and i/o boards that use +5v input voltage and drive
output pins at that voltage.

Then there are passive shields that do no harm by themselves like the "Sensor Shield" but then
depending on what is hooked up to it, it has the potential to do harm because the voltage
provided to each of the sensor headers and connectors is +5v.
In that case, whose at fault?
The sensor in some cases could have run at 3.3v but the shield provided +5v,
however the +5v came from the DUE and the DUE can not handle the 5v inputs.

Even some passive shields have a pullup on the RESET line back to +5v.
(Not sure if that would be an issue for DUE)

So it isn't just 5V shields that will have issues and the potential to blow up DUE pins.

--- bill

Hmmm, release must be imminent. Geez, wake up Italy... :stuck_out_tongue:
I'm quite interested to see the new IDE and code base.

As for the shield problem, plenty of hardware/software nerds here, why not start a community developed voltage tolerant shield just for plugging any voltage shields in, maybe add a few lasers too.

08:45 in Europe.
http://www.arduino.cc/ shows a picture of an Uno and some four-day-old twitter feed.

Hi,

Waiting, waiting, waiting ...

EDIT: I wonder if we will have to wait until the US is up and about ?

Duane B

@Arduino "Should go online on the different websites this morning"

due-tweet.png

I just checked RS
nothing :frowning:
Best regards
Jantje

Jantje:
I just checked RS
nothing :frowning:
Best regards
Jantje

Hi

I found him there:

http://www.homotix.it/index.cfm?Page=Catalogo&IdCatProdotto=139&IdSchedaProdotto=2245

Now, I have a vision, many people all over the world scratching on there desk's even if there high on valium, and waiting for the Arduino Due, at the same time Massimo Banzi is stroking a nealy dead cat (from the endles stroke) and the tells his numbero Uno let them wait till afternoon, then a scary laugh is filling the room, and in some edge someone is playing an sad melody on his violine.

I hope nobody is killing me for this some sort of irony mixed up bad humor. I think Mr. Banzi and his team did a great work with the arduino and the boards it's really incredible how they put the word usability near to microcontroller, and now with the possibility to use an ARM for cool stuff on the horizon there will be the next level of fun. Thank you Mr. Banzi and of course his team.

Markus

Not sure how long it will take to get them in or how long you might be willing to wait, but Mouser Electronics has 25 waiting to come in and listing them at $38 US. Arduino Store has them @ $58 US, but I get errors when I place one in the cart. $20 off is worth the wait to go Mouser.

I looked at Sparkfun and Adafruit this morning and didn't see a thing. I figured the websites would have had them just after midnight and watched the sales rack up by this morning.

Its in the Arduino store
http://store.arduino.cc/ww/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=243

but you can't buy it, because it complains that one unit has beeen added and to change that to one!!

But there is a technical information page now

The main http://arduino.cc/ meanwhile still shows a UNO and has no mention of a new product.

Floris.cc (in Belgium) lists it in their shop, but is out of stock and won't let you order
http://www.pieterfloris.nl/shop/category.php?id_category=7

The Arduino.cc shop seems to have fixed the error, it let me order one now. Postage from Italy to France is quoted as 5 days :roll_eyes:

you can download the new ide at Arduino - Home
I'm curious what the boards.txt looks like.
Looking at the download speed; I'm not the only one downloading
Best regards
Jantje

you can download the new ide at

I love this on that page

WARNING: This software is a beta version, so exspect bugs and..


Rob

Graynomad:

you can download the new ide at

I love this on that page

WARNING: This software is a beta version, so exspect bugs and..


Rob

I exspect allways bugs but I'am old school I make bugs by my self most of the time... ...if I'am in buisness I will other let build bugs for me professionaly.

After a quick glance at the new IDE.
The IDE tools configuration looks amazingly similar to mpide with the platforms.txt files.
It looks like it will now be easy to set/modify compiler and linker flags.
It also appears that flags/defines can be set down to a per board basis using the extensions in
boards.txt similar to what is available in mpide.
This should make things like using floating point xxprintf() code or setting board specific defines much easier.
It also means that moving the maple and chipkit tools sets to this new IDE should be very easy.

One thing that looks like an improvement over mpide is that it appears that there is finally
an attempt at a separation and location for the arduino generic libraries. So now you don't have to keep cloning
library code between the different architectures if it is MCU independent.

--- bill

BTW, I used the new IDE to upload a few sketches to an AVR based board, so the AVR support seems
to be at least somewhat working.