Servo - April 2012

Discuss this article in the SERVO Magazine forums at http://forum.servomagazine.com

Our resident expert on all things robotic is merely an email away.

roboto@servomagazine.com

Tap into the sum of allhumanknowledge and get your questions answered here! From software algorithms to material selection, Mr. Roboto strives to meet you where you are — and what more would you expect from a complex service droid?

by

Dennis Clark

It’s April already! There are plenty of robot competitions and Battle-Bot-ish stuff coming up. Be sure to check out the Events Calender in this issue. Anyway, on to something interesting ...

Q. I want to reply to a previous issue when you talked about the chipKIT. I have been reading up on these quite a bit, and I really want to explore the chipKIT MAX32. I was wondering if you could do a more in-depth write-up on this. I would love to see more of the capabilities of this guy. I know Fred Eady has done some articles on it, but his are more advanced topics; I still consider myself a beginner/novice in the electronics world. Learning about CAN is still well above my head. Now, I’m not saying I want to see a “Hello World” program, but I would like to see some of the more basic stuff such as utilizing the ADC with sensors, basic timer/interrupts, and the like. Also, I would like to see it interfaced with MPLAB utilizing C instead of the Arduino processing structure. If I want help with that, I can just go to the Arduino site. I’m more interested in using this as a development board rather than a small projects board. Thanks!

— Corey Hastings

Figure 1

A. This is an interesting topic, to say the least. I’ve been wanting to investigate these boards a bit more, as well. There is a LOT of capacity in the ChipKit MAX32 board, and it has the side benefit of being Arduino compatible with the new Arduino MPIDE system. I “assume” that you have not hitched your wagon to the “Cult of Arduino” since you want to have projects for this board that use the MPLAB IDE instead of the Arduino. You will definitely have more flexibility and smaller (perhaps faster) code if you use MPLAB over Arduino, but even though you aren’t a fan you should look into the value of the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

The hardware objects written for the Arduino are abstracted enough to remove the drudgery of writing setup code and dealing with the arcane nuance that drives so many beginners mad when writing embedded programs. Try it and see if it fits your needs, then you can move on; some would say, step up to full-on embedded programming right at the “iron.”

Because my ADHD tendency is to get sidetracked by new toys (“shiny things are nice!”), I’m going to start out here with some interesting servo code done with Arduino (I’ll admit) just to shake out the hardware. Next month, I’ll move on to an MPLAB example doing more stuff that folks can find interesting. The MAX32 board has easily accessible I2C and SPI interface pins, as well as a TON of other I/O that can be utilized. In fact, the MAX32 is only one board in Digilent’s chipKIT continuum of PIC32 development boards.