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by
Dennis Clark
How time passes. It’s already getting to be time to make your (my) Santa's list for robot stuff we want but would
never buy for ourselves. As I have
mentioned recently, I spent some time
at the Microchip Master's Conference
in August, and saw many cool and
inspiring things there. One of them
was a chipKIT UNO32 wireless
networking demonstration. This
impressed me so much I talked the ear
off of Gene Apperson (VP of
Engineering) and Keith Vogel (Senior
Software Engineer) about what they
were doing. This was SO much fun
that I've decided to tell you all about it.
I've had questions in the past about
networking a robot; this nifty
demonstration shows how it can be
done fairly inexpensively (more on that
later). What I'm about to show you is a
hands-on lab that Gene and Keith put
Installing the IDE,
Sketch, and Libraries
https://github.com/chipKIT32/chip
KIT32-MAX/downloads.
Pick your platform (all my
screenshots will be from a Mac OS X
machine). You will need an IDE of at
least “20111221” — just get the
latest. All MPIDE installs say they are
Mpide-0023-(other stuff). The chipKIT
14 SERVO 11.2012
on for a standing-room-only crowd at
the conference.
As I've mentioned before, the
Digilent chipKIT series of experimenter
boards are designed to look like and
work like the Arduino hobbyist boards.
The UNO32 and MAX32 (and more
recently, the uC32) have the same form
factor as the Arduino UNO and MEGA
boards. The chipKIT boards use an
enhanced Arduino IDE called MPIDE
(Multi-Platform IDE) that has the same
look and feel as the Arduino, but adds
the ability to utilize the Microchip
PIC32 processor used on the chipKIT
boards. Any Arduino program or library
that isn't written for the AVR chip (by
using AVR assembly code) will most
likely run on a chipKIT board, as will
any Arduino shield that can work at
3.3V. Okay, that was all the
background. Now let’s do some
networking!
Ethernet and Wi-Fi libraries require
Java 6 (1.6.xx) to work, so make sure
that you have them. I had to upgrade
my OS to Snow Leopard for full
compatibility. Once you have installed
MPIDE, you are ready to get the
HttpServer example sketch, C++
extensions, and chipKIT libraries.
My first exposure to MPIDE left
me wondering where I should put
libraries. For the chipKIT boards, you
can’t put them into the usual Arduino
library location — that doesn’t work
(currently). Rick Anderson (one of the
developers of the MPIDE environment)
set me straight on this. You put
chipKIT libraries in your sketch folder,
in a folder called libraries. Then BAM!
Everything works.
