Highly Anticipated 32-bit "Due" due When?

robodude666:

cyclegadget:

Maple seems like an excellent alternative

I bought an Olimex Maple and it is no Arduino. :relaxed:

Please don't call it what it isn't.

The Olimexino-STM32 is not the "Olimex Maple." It is an Arduino and Maple-like board.

LeafLabs, the original makers of the Maple, licensed their software and hardware as open source. Anyone is able to build upon it and Olimex has.

Fair enough, I will use the proper name if I refer to this board again. Often on this forum, if someone uses a Atmega328 with the Arduino IDE, they refer to it as some sort of duino or Arduino compatible. I was using that line of thinking when referring to the board, obviously you still knew what board I was referring to but, I understand your why you prefer more clarity. I was trying to be clear that I had the Olimex and not a Leaflabs board.

Come on Arduino Team. Reply to this thread and tell us what the progress is with the Due please.

Here in Genoa (Home port of the Lifeboats from the Costa Concordia), it's pronounced like " DO A" (A like the letter A is pronounced)

OverDue Due in Italian would be "in ritardo due"

We may as well play with words if we can't play with hardware :slight_smile:

I was looking for a 32 bits Arduino and I bought a chipKIT UNO32 just before the Due was announced.

The chipKIT UNO32 brings lot of processing power at 80 MHz, space with 128 kB, many
IOs and 2 hardware serial ports, for a price close to the Arduino UNO.

The IDE is based on the same standard Processing IDE and can handle both Arduino and chipKIT boards.

I'm glad I haven't waited for the Due!

terryking228:
Here in Genoa (Home port of the Lifeboats from the Costa Concordia), it's pronounced like " DO A" (A like the letter A is pronounced)

OverDue Due in Italian would be "in ritardo due"

We may as well play with words if we can't play with hardware :slight_smile:

Hey think of it as the perfect spaghetti sauce. It will be ready when it's ready, no sooner and no later. Speaking of later I think it's time for a nap. Retirement is great, it's worth the wait also. :wink:

Hej,

David Cuartielles here. First I should apologize for the delay in releasing Due, it has nothing to do with any of the possibilities described in this thread. Our relationship with Atmel is pretty smooth, our design process has been good, and we have materials in stock. The reason for the delay is that we are overwhelmed with the release of Due, Leonardo, Lottie Lemon, the new servers, the backup system, some other boards we haven't even spoken about yet ...

We have been reassigning responsibilities within the core group since we are far too busy to be able of attending everything as we used to and making sure hardware makes it to developers is one of our main concerns. This adjustment process has taken time, we have even opened an office in Torino (Italy) to handle a lot of the small day-to-day things that an open source project like ours requires.

If I look at this thread I can see three topics:

  • one is about the actual Due, when and how
  • one is about the Arduino platform, why it is successful or not
  • a final one is about the openess and not openess

I will try to elaborate on the three topics, but we should probably separate this into three threads and discuss things separately.

ABOUT THE DUE

Asap is the answer. We are working together with Atmel in polishing the BASIC Arduino experience to the board: coding in the IDE, uploading to the board from any platform, monitoring the serial port from any platform.

We have changed processor a couple of times because we want to have something powerful enough to cover many of the things you guys are already doing with Arduino and with other compatible platforms plus adding the power of the 32b. And don't worry it is a standard ARM processor, everything it can do with it at low level is already available in the datasheet of the processor chosen for the task. Please do not ask about the processor, this is the one secret we keep until release date. When the developer's edition of the board comes out, you will be able of making anything you want to on that core: Real Time OSs, basic Arduino functionality, DSP control ... up to you, but you will have to know how to make it ... therefore the name "developer's edition". The initial hardware design is very much like the current Mega, but we need some sort of form factor to reach you guys, let's discuss once the first release is out there.

ABOUT THE PLATFORM AND ITS SUCCESS

It is true that we did never expect to get our platform as far as we have done. We wanted to have something that could work for the lecturing scenarios we were facing at different European/American universities where we were teaching. We had years of experience in different platforms and some of us (Tom to be precise) had even successful books out there talking about how to make prototypes.

We realized that it was time to make things a little better and one of the most important ones was to reach as many as possible by:

  • having everything open: designs, documentation, software
  • being crossplatform: making tools that could run on any computer, anywhere in the world
  • being very active teaching to people, not caring about their initial resources or experience
  • making it competitive in price: we would not include any expenses coming from R&D into the actual design, like others did before us

These four rules required an effort from our side that nobody had been making before. In the "being active teaching to people" chapter: e.g. I spent 2006-2007 travelling the world teaching at different venues. Arduino would NOT pay anything for that, I had to close a deal with a certain university somewhere, make sure they would get the equivalent to the current "starter kit", teach the class, help the teachers there get used to the tools for them to move on, etc. The big difference between hardware and software -in my eyes- is that you need to be there, in a one-to-one situation to help people get started.

Have you ever heard of a company that has people working for it FOR FREE? This is not very different from what happens in the open source/free software world. You sell your expertise as a programmer, because the code is already there.

To be honest, the reason why I, David Cuartielles, was doing this is because I saw a great opportunity for me to write my PhD thesis in educational technologies. The whole world has been my playground to experiment with this platform and try out with people from all over how they felt about digital technologies. It was NEVER about making money. Not for me, and not for my partners. Each one of us has his own story about why Arduino was/is relevant for us and why we were doing it. I believe this is what many of you have also seen in Arduino, a chance for you to build your own personal relationship to a technology that you can use in your everyday life and that you can profit from.

In some countries I was invited by the local ministry in education, like in Argentina, where I made courses for teachers to evaluate what digital technologies meant for them. My courses were not just about Arduino, but Processing, Puredata, linux, etc. I made, with the help of the maker of DyneBolic, a live CD that included all of the above plus open office, etc. I had, and have, a political agenda in openess, specially when it comes to education. This was far before Arduino was part of the Debian/Ubuntu distros.

Summarizing, the reason of Arduino's success is putting hardware at the same level of "fairness" as open source/free software. Highlighting that hardware is nothing that happens inside a magic black box.

ABOUT BEING OPEN

Then again, about the discussion whether our process until now is open or not ... well ... making hardware, or open hardware is far more complex than just making a board. Some companies force you signing an NDA on the features of one of their chips before you can even start prototyping on them. Look e.g. at Raspberry Pi's FAQ and their statement about open hardware ... they just cannot be, period. We made no compromises, we release everything, but until Due we have been in the situation where we were just releasing small modifications on our previous designs. It made no sense to ask anyone to discuss about the boards ... there was no disruptive innovation in them.

In 2010 we used a whole lot of the Arduino savings in launching an even in NY where we invited relevant members of the Arduino community to come together and discuss about the platform, about the future of it, about how to make it better, how to get people even more involved ...

... one of the results of that meeting was that people wanted to be more involved in both the core development (and please join developers@arduino.cc if you want to be discussing about the development of the core) as well as being part in the hardware development. During that meeting Massimo introduced the idea of the development made at the Mozilla Foundation where they could reach very quick iterations in design by involving users in a certain way. At that point, internally we had been talking about the 32b version of the platform and we thought it could be a great opportunity to create the so-called development batches for people like most of you involved in this discussion to be a part in the creation of the next generations of boards.

We spent a long time during 2011 thinking about how to make this and we decided Due was the right step to take. We wanted to have Due demo'd on stage at Maker Faire 2010 in September. We wanted something more than the announcement. But there were technical issues beyond the Arduino team that made it impossible. For you guys to know, we brought our software development team all the way to NY because we believed possible to have a board on stage. They worked overnight to make sure the bootloader did the job and, unfortunately it was finished after the end of the show. Our idea with the Due was -and it still is- that we will make the basic things work on it, we will release it, and will invite you, that are interested in discussing about how to make things, to be part of the discussion.

When you want to make something cost-effective, and you want it to reach as many as possible, you need to make sure you ship your first 1000 units in good shape, and that you have enough parts to send the second 1000 in a week, because that is what happens in open source hardware: you make it and if it is successful, it will be copied (probably also improved) ... the only way to make things good is being there first, and making it right at first. Well, in this case we want the second 1000 to come with your improvements. We need to make a board that works, and on top of that we can all play and make something better.

So being open for us is to put everything we learned in the process of making things back to the community. And also now to bring the community into the development process of the software and the hardware.

I hope this answered some of your questions ... it took me some time to write it.

/d

as I have manifested this at plenty of conferences, open software gatherings, etc,

wow - thank you so much for taking the time
more power to your elbow

David
Thanks for the effort.
If you place a price on one of the 1000 first due's I (and probably many other) may want to order one before you made it :slight_smile:
For sure if it has debugging capabilities.
Best regards
Jan

I like this statement of vision.

David, First a very large thanks for all your work and dedication on Arduino. I'm sure it took you on a wild ride. Many of us have enjoyed the trip a lot also.

Could you answer, or point to, one more thing:

  • How can a moderately technically proficient person (Hardware, software or both) get involved right now:
  • Get in the queue to buy an early Due version
  • Get connected to the development / beta effort and contribute

I've read quite a bit, without being in the active group, and I still have no idea how to do those two things.

I know there are risks in adding people and connections: "Brook's Law" = "Adding manpower to a late software project will make it later!". I worked for IBM and I have met Frederick Brooks and I have worked on a software project that lost $11,000,000 proving it yet again. I believe.

But I want to help!

David,

Thanks for the update. I was wondering about the delay.

I've got a couple of the PIC32-based chipKIT "Arduinos". How does the Due compare with that?

Arduino has answered why the Due is late. Basically, they ran into technical difficulties and busy with other projects. They were very wise to avoid another release date for the Due because this forum will keep them honest. Glad to hear the Due is in work. I suspected a complete abandonment of the project. Glad to read I was wrong. Let’s face it, Italy is ground zero for the renaissance of modular microcontrollers.

After reading David’s response from Arduino, I realized the crux of their success is two-fold and difficult to emulate. First, the purposeful grass roots exposure at colleges and universities and usage by eager and energetic students made Arduino extremely popular. That kind of exposure is very difficult to buy. Then came “Make” magazine - more exposure - every month. Second reason for their success: price.

Two questions for Arduino: (I know, this is a long shot)

  1. What is the projected price for the basic Due?
  2. When will the Due be available?

It's still over Due.......... 8)

Lefty

Impressive and eye opening documentary about the story of Arduino (link below). The opening title and music reminds me of dada art. What I find striking about this story is how international this whole Arduino endeavor is. Also striking is that the main force elevating Arduino is not $profit but rather education, for technical people and artists. Anyway, excellent production.

Everyday the Arduino Due being late reminds me of the old silicon valley term "VAPORWARE" ]:slight_smile:

Yes it's a shame, David C gave a pretty good explanation the gist of which (I think) is that there is too much to do an too few people to do it.

Many of us have offered to help but I guess throwing more engineers at a problem is not always the thing to do (there's a famous saying about that isn't there?).

That said you think you could farm out some things, like porting the libraries across. Many of the modules would be autonomous I would think, give SPI to one person, I2C to another etc. Maybe that is in fact what's happening with some selected developers, it's just such a big job.


Rob

Looks like the Raspberry Pi will be delivered before the Due.
T.

Yes but the Raspberry Pi is some what crippled from an I/O point of view. Of the 56 GPIO pins there are only 14 brought out to the header. There are a number of expansion boards in the pipe line but the "official one" in effect sticks an arduino on these pins and gives some port expansion. But this does not include I2C and will cost about £100, that is 4 times the price of the Pi itself.

On the main board there is no built in A/D and the drive on the 3V3 digital pins is some what minimal, so no driving LEDs at any great brightness without an expansion board.
It looks like it will be more of a programmers system than a physical computing platform.

My Pi's delivery has been put back from the middle of April to the start of May. I was lucky and managed to get an order in on the first day but about 12 hours after the start.

It looks like it will be more of a programmers system than a physical computing platform.

Looks like it. I just spent a couple of hours reading some of the RPi forum. Many of the comments are interesting, things like "Wow it's got I2C, I'll be able to talk to a sensor", "Can I connect the RS232 to USB?" and about 20 questions about if the IO is 5v or 3v3, and that's just on one thread!

It seems that the audience for this is coming from a different place to the average Arduino user.

expansion boards in the pipe line but the "official one"

Is that the Gert board or another?


Rob

Is that the Gert board

Yes, Gert is the hardware guy for the entire project, and his board is his own sideline.
I asked if it was going to be open source, but he said as he had spent a lot of his own money on the project so far he hoped to recoup some of it from sales of the boards. Can't exactly blame him for that, but it would not be the way I would have done it. He also seems to be trying ( and failing at the moment ) to implement the debugWire in the 328 system. So you can tell he is not so very experienced if he thinks such a simple processor needs this.

Many of the comments are interesting

Agreed, the comments fall into a few narrow categories:-

  1. Sycophantic - you are all doing such a wonderful job ( despite the evidence of such a botched launch )
  2. The amazed innocents - wow only £100 for an interface board we have to pay £800 for a control board at my school.
  3. The pissed off - you promised a computer at $25 and now I am expected to pay tax and carriage on top of that!
  4. The Linux code nerds - I am porting "big bits 6.3" to the Pi ( who knows or cares what that is )
  5. The haven't got a clue about interfacing but this sounds like it should be an impressive question - what is the pitch of the header.