If you’ve been hungry for much more power for your microcontroller projects, however reluctant to dump your investment in Arduino shields or the libraries as well as neighborhood understanding that choose them all, Digilent has you covered. Their new chipKIT boards are developed around the Microchip PIC32 MCU…a powerful 32-bit chip that up until just recently was left out of the cross-platform scene. A majority of code as well as rather a number of Arduino shields will work “out of the box” with the chipKIT, and the familiar advancement tools are offered for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac as well as Linux.
We very first discussed these a couple weeks ago, however the software application was unavailable at the time. Seeing the advancement tools in action was rather unexpected…
What’s truly interesting with chipKIT is that the workflow is precisely Arduino-like. The serial bootloader works with avrdude, as well as you can program both “real” Arduinos as well as Digilent’s 32-bit work-alikes utilizing the precise exact same IDE; there’s no requirement to run two different IDEs for two different boards, as has been the situation with leaf Labs’ 32-bit Maple. As a demonstration, they compiled as well as ran code for an Arduino Mega with SparkFun LCD shield…then popped the shield off as well as put it on the Max32, chosen the 32-bit board in the exact same IDE, as well as repeated the process. The precise code ran on the new board/shield combo, with spectacular performance — all the common Arduino libraries have been implemented natively for the PIC32; this is not emulation.
Because Digilent didn’t just adapt the Arduino IDE to their one particular board, however rather established a system by which the IDE can be prolonged to new hardware, it’s their hope that their work (not an official Arduino project) may be rolled back into the mainline code, as well as that other designers may jump on the bandwagon to offer Arduino IDE support for their own boards, whether they be based on AVR, PIC32 or a totally different type of microcontroller altogether. The groundwork has been laid.
The chipKIT is available in two versions: Uno32 as well as Max32, similar in type element to the Arduino Uno as well as Mega 2560, respectively. These can be purchased directly from Digilent’s web site, as well as the IDE is freely downloadable as of today. We have evaluation hardware in-hand as well as expect to be offering a appropriate evaluation in the near future.