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These Hong Kong vendors put the word "Arduino" on any electronic device just to sell more stuff.
This is a microcontroller, brand is STM and it's core is ARM 32 Cortex-M3.
It's kinda the little brother of Arduino DUE, and it's much cheaper.
Includes debug on board (USB).
If you read the description it says it has its own ide called maple, they claim it is code compatible with Arduino. This means you can grab the blink example and paste it on maple ide, and it will compile.
luisilva:
I believe that can be difficult using some shield because there will not be some compatible libraries.
It depends on how big the community is.
The launchpad community seems to be growing and they have translated many arduino libraries, same with teensy and pinguino.
mcnobby:
I just bought one of those mini maple leafs, at only a few quid it is worth the risk just to find out how it flies.
Me too (the Maple clone, not the original item I posted)
The Maple documentation & IDE seems reasonably good. Lets hope these clones are not significantly different in any important respect. The only differences the vendor mentions is related to power supply and board layers. This may mean we won't get the 11~12 bits accuracy of the original Maple on the analog inputs.
Shame the Maple forum is a graveyard compared to Arduino forum! Sounds like LeafLabs may be abandoning support, or at least future development for the Mini.
mcnobby:
I just bought one of those mini maple leafs, at only a few quid it is worth the risk just to find out how it flies.
And me too - marginally cheaper again on the Australian site. The seller (I figure one seller frequently operates under a number of names; they come with the same postmark!) might wonder about/ be amused by the sudden "blip" in sales of one item.
It's sort of a beefed-up Nano, as is Crossroads' device. Runs at 3.3V so you really, really don't want to stress the regulator. And the clone is very much stripped-down from the original, missing the analog noise minimisation features.
For a summarized version of pertinent information contained in this lengthly
thread. Also, some simple Mini Maple projects with source may be found on
my blog: http://www.hackster.io/rayburne
I just completed a 90-day play with the PSoC $4 32-bit ARM prototype boards running at 48MHz with 32K EEPROM and 4K SRAM.
But in general, the ARM 32-bit is just another processor. In most of the projects that I cloned from the Arduino world, the 8-bit Arduino worked equally as well as the 32-bit ARM. The Cypress PSoC has some great hardware features such as OpAmps, Configurable digital blocks, and way cool PWM. But, the downside is the community... small communities mean more work for me (you) as you must research, implement, write, lots of support software.
Personally, except for specific things such as FFT or native 32-bit algorithms, I think the Arduino 8-bit and Due 32-bit environments are more productive. Although the GUI is a sad excuse when compared to what professional tools can provide.
In my case, it comes down to fun. I learned a lots with the 32-bit ARM but I also used a lots of 4-letter words from my old Air Force days.
Here is the last sentence of my blog:
Hurry-up and wait in the Arduino translated to hurry-up and wait longer in the PSoC.
The community is often the most important component for getting a project working! It was/is true of the PicAxe forum and its true here.
Simpler is often better for the hobbyist. That's why Arduino has been successful. When the hobbyist outgrows the 8-bit AVRs, the need is often simply for more speed, ram and/or flash.
Megas, Bobuinos and the like only really provide 2 of those 3. The 16 (or 20) MHz limit, combined with 8-bit architecture, can become the next bottleneck.
Having said that, and before anyone else comments, I expect 4 out of 5 Arduino users hit those limits because of inefficiencies in their own sketch. Learning to make better use of those limited resources is where they should probably focus, rather than immediately reaching for more powerful hardware, because that will only result in their sketch becoming even more inefficient!
You probably remember my fascination with Conway's Game of Life. I would still like to adapt my algorithm for a larger matrix. For that I would need more ram. Currently it maxes out the ram on a mega328 processing a 128x64 matrix. A Mega644/1284 would allow that, but to keep up the speed on that larger matrix, I would need more processing speed too. So that's one thing I would like to try out on this ARM-thing one day.
Hi Paul,
I have been using a 32mhz TTL clock generator on a atmega328 for some time now without any problems, I think the 20mhz limit maybe for using crystals, I used 20mhz xtal and it was fine, but a 24mhz xtal just didnt start, so I decided to try the ttl clocks
But I was thinking of, for example, a 320x240 pixel lcd. That's 10 times as many cells in the Life matrix as 128x64, so would need 10 times the ram and 10 times the processing speed. The move from 8 to 32 bit architecture might get me a 4x speed improvement, so I would need another 3x clock speed improvement also (this is all back-of-a-fag-packet obviously). I would probably need 10x SPI speed also to update the display quickly enough.
The move from 8 to 32 bit architecture might get me a 4x speed improvement, so I would need another 3x clock speed improvement also
Not necessarily. It is possible to make up that much through software optimizations sometimes
My GoL algorithm processes cells in parallel for groups of 32 / 64 cells stored as a long or long long unsigned int. The 8 bit Arduinos I have run it on so far have to deal with this data in 4 or 8 byte operations. I'm hoping the ARM can do this more efficiently in 1 or 2 operations.
