Amicus shields

[Bruce]

Dave,

Xino Basic board I have on order

Any reason you would prefer the Xino over an Amicus18 board? The Amicus18 is pretty nice, supports any compiler, and it's fast!

Rmteo,

Are you referring to this? http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/...=CHIPKIT-UNO32

That's it. Have you tried one yet?

[dhouston]

Any reason you would prefer the Xino over an Amicus18 board?

Bruce,

I really don't use PICs beyond the 8-pinners and and occasional 16F688 or 16F88. For bigger projects I use ZBasic, who have added a lot of low level features that I've requested. At my age (70), I haven't the time to learn (or debug) the low level techniques like you and Darrell plus I've always subscribed to the view behind the Basic dialects that there are far more experts in non-computer fields than there are computer experts who can write the code the former could use. PICAXE and Xino fit right into that. And, I'm a big fan of versatility (PIC, PICAXE, Genie E28 whatever that is). Finally, I'm just plain cheap.

This is from the web page where I ordered the Xino...

Designed to be the most economic way possible of running a PIC or PICAXE/Genie with Arduino shaped plug and play shields.

The inspiration for this adapter board came from a number of educational users. They said they wanted a child friendly development board like the XINO Pro but at pocket money prices. We like a challenge, so the thoughts began.............

• It had to be very low cost.
• It had to support a wide range of microcontrollers, especially those that were already "in education", as well as "proper" compilers for bare PIC's.
• It had to remain "Arduino" shaped.
• It had to be robust enough for tiny hands.

The XINO Basic appears adequate to the limited testing of prototype Amicus18 shields I plan.

[dhouston]

If the danged EDIT feature was working I'd have added...

It also seems like a good way for noobies, etc. to be able to do hands on testing of things like the EM500, GA1000, ConnectOne modules, etc. before committing to a dedicated PCB design. Thus, I plan shields that have sockets for such devices like the one in this thread.

And building it will kill some time while I continue to patiently await the long-promised firmware for the EM500/GA1000 combo.

[cncmachineguy]

Dave, It seems you have been waiting a while for the firmware? - LOL just poking fun.

This is GREAT stuff you are working on.

[dhouston]

Dave, It seems you have been waiting a while for the firmware?

Not according to Lester. It's been more than a year.

Thanks for the kudos. I think the layout is more or less final. I want to see the XINO board before deciding on the TX, RX & RESET connections. And, the 8 unconnected pins on the EM500 form a GPIO port. Five of those pins (which five awaits the release the long-promised firmware) are used for an SPI link to the GA1000. I'll connect all eight to the GA1000 pads - that way users can just use a perf board with a male header to access the GPIO port when the GA1000 is not used. That keeps it simple and inexpensive.

[rmteo]

Rmteo,

That's it. Have you tried one yet?

I have not tried it as I no longer work with MCHP MCUs. I did take a look at this one as it uses an ST32 processor http://leaflabs.com/devices/maple/

[dhouston]

Right now it looks like the ds30 bootloader will work with the 16F88 so I may end up with a nifty little, super economical development system for prototyping, testing PIC code and prototyping, testing shields. I'll be able to say a bit more once I get the XINO kit. There's a dearth of online documentation so all is possible until I get the hardware and documentation and reality sets in.

For working with the EM500/GA1000 (if the long-promised firmware is ever released) we only need a serial link and a reset line with very simple code since all the heavy lifting takes place in the EM500 (which requires coding in Tibbo's Basic dialect).

I think I can do a similar simple shield for the ConnectOne Socket LanReach and mini iWiFi modules (one only plugged in at a time).

Oh, one change to the layout. I've doubled the pads around the perimeter so a scope or logic probe can access pins which are not used on the shield but may be employed in the PIC program being developed for a more permanent design.

[dhouston]

I did take a look at this one as it uses an ST32 processor

Impressive. I wonder how they handle USB on the PC end.

[rmteo]

Impressive. I wonder how they handle USB on the PC end.

Not sure what you mean. PC side?

[dhouston]

Not sure what you mean. PC side?

Do they provide virtual serial port drivers for Windows, Linux, OSX or must users write their own routines to handle USB?

[rmteo]

The STM32 includes a dedicated USB peripheral which can be configured to act as a generic USB slave device with transfer rates up to 12Mbps. It is configured for two uses: first, to receive sketch/program uploads from the IDE and secondly, to emulate a regular serial port for use as a terminal (text read/write). For more info, see http://leaflabs.com/docs/usb.html and http://leaflabs.com/docs/lang/api/se...lang-serialusb

[dhouston]

Good luck with that.