Servo - November 2011

It looks like an Arduino, programs like an Arduino, and even runs the standard Arduino programs. The port isn’t complete at this moment, but by the time you read this, it may well be. This is an Arduino on steroids. The UNO32 has 128K Flash and 16K of RAM. You can do a lot with that!

Rumor has it that the Arduino developer crew is going to accept most of the MPIDE expansions into the next official Arduino IDE release. Mark and Rick believe this will open the door for others to port different hardware to the Arduino stable more easily. Digilent has even stayed within the fully open source Arduino mindset and has made the ChipKit UNO32 board designs and bootloader fully available for anyone else to create their own UNO32 designs. So, if you ever wished that your Arduino could be faster, your wish has been granted.

Running the typical demo programs from Arduino (ones not optimized to the AVR ATmega parts) will look the same as they do on a 16 MHz ATmega Arduino; they’ll just run about 6-7 times faster (by my ad hoc timing experiments). I’ve even gotten the SparkFun color LCD shield and NKC color LCD shield programs to run.

There are a few things to look out for, and they all have to do with code written and optimized on the ATmega parts. If you translate them to C32 (Microchip’s C compiler) format, they’ll work on the UNO32 series of boards. (If there is interest in this, I can do a more in-depth article on the UNO32 boards in the future.) Figure 5 and Figure 6 are shots of the UNO32 and its basic I/O shield from Digilent. The basic I/O shield has the following stuff on it:

Figure 5. ChipKit UNO32 80 MHz Arduino board.

The four FET drivers are “low side” 20V, 3A drivers useful for controlling relays or single direction motors (a stepper, for instance). The OLED display is pretty cool too. The Arduino hackers are porting sketches to control these pieces; these scripts should be available soon.

Well, that’s it for another Mr. Roboto this month. Keep on building robots, and if you have any questions about new ways to do, old ways to do things, or new things in general, drop me an email. I can be reached at roboto@servomagazine.com. SV