Earlier in the year, Microchip Technology and Digilent Incorporated. announced the release of the chipKIT series, which are development boards primarily based on Microchip Technology's 32 bit Microcontrollers that utilize the MIPS M4K 32 bit core. The original idea was to reach 32 bit processing capacity from the 8 bit version, while still being able to use the code examples, reference materials , application examples and other resources that exist with the first Arduino version. Many months were spent on the complex task of modifying and extending the present hardware and software and adding improvements on the Arduino IDE so the code may be downloaded with no modification onto the PIC32 microcontrollers. This teamwork resulted in the genesis of an improved version of the Arduino 0022 IDE that was renamed Multi-Platform or MPIDE and it might be used with both the ChipKIT boards as well as normal Arduino boards. The Arduino libraries have been also been modified to support these new boards as well as standard Arduino boards. All this work has been gave back to the open-source Arduino community.
This new platform is an open-source hardware and software solution meant for amateurs and users who want to play around with embedded applications with no knowledge of electronics or embedded controllers. The open-source Multi-Platform Integrated Development (MPIDE) runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and is fully backward compatible with the Arduino IDE. This IDE contains everything needed to start developing Arduino applications. The software environment is made in Java and based primarily on the Processing coding language. This language was developed for amateurs as a software sketchbook and teaches basics of embedded programming by employing visual methods.
A couple of new experimental boards were created, the chipKIT UNO32, and the chipKIT MAX32. The Uno32 is idential in form factor as the Arduino Uno board and the Max32 is the same form factor as the Arduino "Mega" board. Both boards are compatible with many Arduino shields. They feature a USB port for connection to the IDE and can be powered via USB or an external power supply.
The Max version of the board contains the PIC32MX795F512L processor, featuring advanced connectivity peripherals, including USB 2.0 (Full-Speed Host, Device and OTG) controller, 10/a hundred Ethernet MAC, and twin CAN controllers. The microcontroller has a MIPS processor core running at eighty Mhz together with 512K of flash and 128K of RAM memory.
The Uno version has a PIC32MX320F128 processor, a 80 Mhz 32-bit MIPS processor core, 128K Flash, and 16K SRAM information memory. Both boards have several timers, a 16-channel 1 MSPS Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), two comparators, and multiple I2C, SPI, and UART interfaces.
These boards can be programmed using an environment primarily based on the first Arduino IDE changed to support PIC32 (MPIDE). Additionally, these boards are absolutely compatible with the advanced Microchip MPLAB IDE and the PICKit3 in-system programmer/debugger in the Microchip development environment. There are a few versions of these. The new MPLAB-X is cross platform and can be downloaded for nothing.
The chipKIT development platform can meet the needs of either beginners or advanced users by sticking to the simple to use, open-source philosophy of the Arduino community, providing far more performance and functionality than any other Arduino solution at a lower price.
About the Author:
Embedded Adventures is an internet site that explores embedded electronics and has many development platforms such as the Uno32 and Max32 Chipkit series ready for your next microcontroller project.
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