The Arduino Due will have an Atmel SAM3U processor.
The Arduino team said in the announcement "We plan a final and tested release by the end of 2011".
The Atmel SAM3U processors are O.K. but there are a lot of other interesting ARM processors.
Will the Arduino ARM environment be modular enough to support other "Arduino-compatible format boards" like Maple?
This is not as easy as with AVR work-alike boards. ARM processors from different vendors may have a ARM Cortex core but the chip's peripherals are very different.
Clearly vendors of work-alike ARM boards will need to do a lot more software to use the Arduino ARM IDE.
Maple uses STM32 processors and has some very nice hardware Maple | LeafLabs.
I can't think of ANY way to add the Due to Arduino WITHOUT making it easier to support other ARMS than it is now (and indeed additional architectures other than ARM.) But I wouldn't expect the initial implementation to be the be-all and end-all of modularity, either. It'll be interesting to see which of the existing "more modular infrastructures" will get "leveraged" into the core Arduino distribution.
I hope the Arduino ARM software architecture is portable to other ARM boards. I like the spec of ST new Cortex-M4 board and would love to see it running on it:
What I get from the olimex.com, there are three kind of IDE today, targeting different hardware / micro-controllers:
Arduino has inspired two other major derivates - MAPLE and PINGUINO. Based on 8-bit AVR technology the computational power of Arduino boards are modest, this is why team from MIT developed MAPLE project which is based on Cortex M3 STM32F103RBT6 microcontroller, the board have same friendly IDE as Arduino and offers the same capabilities as hardware and software but runs the Arduino code much faster. Maple project can be found at http://leaflabs.com
In parallel with Arduino another project was started called PINGUINO. This project choose the first implementation to be with PIC microcontrollers, the reason was that AVRs were hard to find in some parts of the world like South America so you will see lot of PINGUINO developers are from there. PINGUINO project founders decided to go with Python instead Java for processing language. For the moment PINGUINO is much more flexible than Arduino as not limited to 8bit, currently the IDE which have GCC in background can support 8-bit PIC microcontrollers, 32bit PIC32 (MIPS) microcontrollers and ARM7/CORTEXM3 microcontrollers which makes PINGUINO very flexible as once you make your project you can migrate easily through different hardware platforms and not being connected to single microcontroller manufacturer. The PINGUINO project can be found at http://www.pinguino.cc
In order to maintain compatibility with the existing code and resources in the Arduino™ community, it was important to create a seamless transition for the user from their existing Arduino™ boards to the chipKIT™ platform. The core chipKIT™ team contacted experienced Arduino™ IDE developers Mark Sproul and Rick Anderson from the Fair Use Building and Research Labs in Central New Jersey.
In the later half of 2010, Mark Sproul began the arduous task of porting software source files and modifying the existing bootloader from a fork of the existing Arduino™ 0022 IDE while Rick Anderson made changes and improvements to the IDE itself. Rick's efforts resulted in the creation of a modified version of the Arduino™ 0022 IDE that was renamed Multi-Platform or MPIDE as it could be used with both the chipKIT™ boards and existing Arduino™ boards further abstracting the Microcontroller architecture from the user.
STM32 chips have a ROM loader that can be selected by holding a pin, BOOT0, high at reset time.
The bootloader is stored in the internal boot ROM memory (system memory) of STM32
devices. It is programmed by ST during production. Its main task is to download the
application program to the internal Flash memory through one of the available serial
peripherals (USART, CAN, USB, etc.). A communication protocol is defined for each serial
interface, with a compatible command set and sequences.
The STM32F4 Discovery board looks fun. I have on on order from DigiKey for under $20 and it should ship within a month.
STM32F407VGT6 microcontroller featuring 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F core, 1 MB Flash, 192 KB RAM
168 MHz/210 DMIPS Cortex-M4 with single cycle DSP MAC and floating point unit
