We just complete MOD-RS485-ISO galvanically isolated RS485 to UEXT module which allow all our development boards with UEXT connector to interface RS485 products, our old MOD-RS485 module was without galvanic insulation but as RS485 is used a lot in industrial and noisy environment we decided to release isolated version too.

The preliminary schematic of MOD-RD485-ISO is here:

note that after the prototyping this schematic may have changes, we add PIC16F1503 microcontroller to handle the UEXT communication and addressing by I2C.

Just learned today that Ken Segler is working on RS485 project with DuinoMite and implements MODBUS protocol by DuinoMite and MOD-RS485, for this purpose he implements 9 bit UART configuration.

For those who have not spoted yet PIC16F1503 is cool small new microcontroller from Microchip which cost USD 0.80 in small quatities!

It have 2K Flash and 12 GPIOs, 4 PWMs, ADC, DAC (5bit) and configurable logic for the ports!

We decided to put this PIC to all our new UEXT boards just to handle the I2C addressing and to allow many different modules to connect to UEXT bus without interferences.

PIC-H1503 is small header board we designed to may play with PIC16F1503 and USB-PWR is small module which powers BreadBoard bus through USB with selectable 3.3V-5V 

both USB-PWR and PIC-H1503 board will be ready for sale in March.

USB-PWR will cost EUR 1.95

PIC-H1503 will cost EUR 1.95

AVR-T32U4 is another development board based on ATMega32U4 thus compatible with Arduino IDE, so you can use it with AVRStudio+AVRGCC or with Arduino IDE up to your choice.

The board have USB mini connector, UEXT connector, RESET and user BUTTON and all GPIOs available on two rows + ICSP 6 pin connector for programming if you do not want to use Arduino IDE.

if you still can’t figure out why this odd shape is you can look at this picture:

YES when you plug it on Breadboard you got power supplied on the upper and lower power busses, so you have all GPIOs to wire jump without carrying for the power supply.

This brilliant idea was invented by our friend Ken Segler who maintain DuinoMite DM-BASIC. He had PIC board in this shape which we loved the moment we saw it and decided to make AVR, MSP430 and PIC T-shaped boards, so MSP430-T5510 and PIC32-T795 were born this way.

AVR-T32U4 is with retail EUR 12.95 and available in stock now!

OLIMEXINO-5510 is board specially designed for the EasyMSP project which is created by Matthew Burmeister (a.k.a. MattTheGeek from 43oh.com). Matt did amazing work by creating Arduino like language and commands to compile with MSP430 hardware just adding these in header files, so they compile with MSPGCC. The project now is over 13 000 lines of code!

EasyMSP community is at 43oh.com forum http://www.43oh.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=34

The project is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/easymsp/

When we learned about EasyMSP the first idea was to create custom open hardware board which to work with EasyMSP. So I contacted Matt and asked him if he wants custom board build for his project. This is how OLIMEXINO-5510 was born.

Today we produced the first prototype and tomorrow we will FedEx one OLIMEXINO-5510 to Math for verification. If everything is OK we will have these boards available early in March ready for sale.

The retail price of OLIMEXINO-5510 will be EUR 12.95

So if you want to develop some handheld or battery powered devices with USB connection to PC OLIMEXINO-5510 is the low cost solution for you.

PIC32-PINGUINO-MX220 is ULTRA LOW COST Arduino Like entry level board. The retail price of this board is EUR 9.95!

Here is comparison table of PIC32-PINGUINO-MX220 hardware capabilities and Arduino-UNO:

During Embedded World exhibition Microchip and Olimex will give away 1000 of these boards to interested customers who already work with Pinguino, Arduino or Maple or are curious to try this platform.

The boards are assembled and tested now and today we start the final bootloader programming.

These processors are very very new and Pinguino development team worked hard last week to add support for them in the new Pinguino IDE.

Today the bootloader and the IDE were tested and everything works.

Now is time to port the demo applications for Bluetooth and Zigbee connectivity which we will demostrate on our booth.

This year we co-exhibit with MOUSER so you can see us on their booth. If you are visiting Embedded World you are welcome to pass by and pickup your free PINGUINO

The new safety MCU HERCULES board is in stock! The TMS570LS series is a high performance automotive grade microcontroller family which has been certified for use in IEC 61508 SIL3 safety systems. The safety architecture includes Dual CPUs in lockstep, CPU and Memory Built-In Self Test (BIST) logic, ECC on both the Flash and the data SRAM, parity on peripheral memories, and loop back capability on peripheral IOs.

The TMS570LS family integrates the ARM® Cortex™-R4F Floating Point CPU which offers an efficient 1.6 DMIPS/MHz, and has configurations which can run up to 160 MHz providing more than 250 DMIPS. The TMS570LS series also provides different Flash 2MB and data SRAM 160KB with single bit error correction and double bit error detection.

TMS570-CAN specs are implressive – this board with DUAL CORE CORTEX-RF4 processor running at 140 Mhz with 2 MB of internal FLASH, 160 KB of RAM. The microcontroller used is TMS570LS20216 ARM Cortex-R4F.

For only EUR 24.95 this is real bargain, so get yours until our stock last. We built limited number of these boards, so hurry up to get yours before they are gone!

The popular programmer AVR-ISP-MK2 in stock: http://www.olimex.com/dev/avr-isp-mk2.html

with impressive list of SUPPORTED DEVICES:

• XMEGA Devices: ATxmega16A4U, ATxmega32A4U, ATxmega64A3U, ATxmega128A3U, ATxmega192A3U, ATxmega256A3U, ATxmega256A3BU, ATxmega64B3, ATxmega128B3, ATxmega64B1, ATxmega128B1, ATxmega16A4, ATxmega32A4, ATxmega64A4U, ATxmega128A4U, ATxmega64A3, ATxmega128A3, ATxmega192A3, ATxmega256A3, ATxmega256A3B, ATxmega64A1, ATxmega128A1, ATxmega16D4, ATxmega32D4, ATxmega64D4, ATxmega128D4, ATxmega64D3, ATxmega128D3, ATxmega192D3, ATxmega256D3
• MegaAVR Devices: ATmega48, ATmega48A, ATmega48P, ATmega48PA, ATmega8, ATmega8515, ATmega8535, ATmega88, ATmega88A, ATmega88P, ATmega88PA, ATmega8A, ATmega16, ATmega162, ATmega164A, ATmega164P, ATmega164PA, ATmega165P,ATmega165PA, ATmega168, ATmega168A, ATmega168P, ATmega168PA, ATmega16A, ATmega32, ATmega324A, ATmega324P, ATmega324PA, ATmega325, ATmega3250, ATmega3250A, ATmega3250P, ATmega325A, ATmega325P, ATmega325PA, ATmega328, ATmega328P, ATmega32A, ATmega64, ATmega640, ATmega644, ATmega644A, ATmega644P, ATmega644PA, ATmega645, ATmega6450, ATmega6450A, ATmega6450P, ATmega645A, ATmega645P, ATmega64A, ATmega128, ATmega1280, ATmega1281, ATmega1284, ATmega1284P, ATmega128A, ATmega2560, ATmega2561, AT90CAN128, AT90CAN32, AT90CAN64, ATmega16M1, ATmega32M1, ATmega64M1, AT90PWM1, AT90PWM161, AT90PWM216, AT90PWM2B, AT90PWM316, AT90PWM3B, AT90PWM81, AT90USB1286, AT90USB1287, AT90USB162, AT90USB646, AT90USB647, AT90USB82, ATmega16U2, ATmega16U4, ATmega32U2, ATmega32U4, ATmega8U2, ATmega169A, ATmega169P, ATmega169PA, ATmega329, ATmega3290, ATmega3290A, ATmega3290P, ATmega329A, ATmega329P, ATmega329PA, ATmega649, ATmega6490, ATmega6490A, ATmega6490P, ATmega649A, ATmega649P
• tinyAVR Device: ATtiny4, ATtiny5, ATtiny9, ATtiny10, ATtiny13A, ATtiny13, ATtiny20, ATtiny40, ATtiny24A, ATtiny24, ATtiny44A, ATtiny44, ATtiny84A, ATtiny84, ATtiny25, ATtiny45, ATtiny85, ATtiny261A, ATtiny261, ATtiny461A, ATtiny461, ATtiny861A, ATtiny861, ATtiny26, ATtiny2313A, ATtiny2313, ATtiny4313, ATtiny43U, ATtiny28L, ATtiny48, ATtiny88, ATtiny87, ATtiny167
• Automotive AVR Devices: AT32UC3C0512C, AT32UC3C1512C, AT32UC3C2512C, ATtiny24, ATtiny44, ATtiny84, ATtiny25, ATtiny45, ATtiny85, ATtiny87, ATtiny88, ATtiny167, ATtiny261, ATtiny461, ATtiny861, ATmega48 , ATmega88 , ATmega168, ATmega328P, AT90CAN32 , AT90CAN64, AT90CAN128, ATmega32C1, ATmega64C1, ATmega16M1, ATmega32M1, ATmega64M1, ATmega164P, ATmega324P, ATmega644P, ATmega169P, ATmega48PA, ATmega88PA, ATmega168PA

To install StickOS on DuinoMite is very easy, you should go in bootloader mode and start DuinoMite bootloader then to load this HEX: http://www.cpustick.com/downloads/StickOS.PIC32.DuinoMite-Mega.v1.92d.elf.hex and then if you are on WIndows you need this INF file for the USB VID/PID which StickOS uses: http://www.cpustick.com/cpustick.inf

when you program the HEX code and press reset new COM port will be created you can use your terminal program of choice to connect to this port and you will see:

Welcome to StickOS for Microchip PIC32MX7-F512H DuinoMite-Mega v1.92d!
Copyright (c) 2008-2012; all rights reserved.

http://www.cpustick.com

support@cpustick.com
(checksum 0xe2e6)
>

StickOS pre-tokenize BASIC command and do syntax check while you enter your code

This is good as it speeds the execution of the code later also it prevent you to write code with syntax errors.

For instance if you want to write:

>10 non-existing command
^ – error

you will receive this error message and nothing will be stored to line 10

pre-tokenizing the source allow later the interpreter to switch the statements with single byte  comparison instead the multiply byte comparison which MM/DM BASIC does and this allow speed increase, another speed increase feature is that StickOS uses just the real PIC32 peripherials and do not make bit-banging as MM BASIC does, this result it x4 times faster execution:

10 dim a
20 configure timer 1 for 1 s
30 on timer 1 do print a
40 for a = 1 to 200000
50 next

prints 112518 BASIC instructions per second

what I missing in StickOS is:

- no VGA and PS2 keyboard support

- no SD card file system

- print command is very simplified

- not open source, although there is mechanism to add new commands by skeleton source which links the core basic as pre-compiled object code

It’s very easy to go back to MM/DM BASIC by simply entering bootloader mode and re-loading the HEX file for MM/DM BASIC.

If you want to give it try to StickOS BASIC you can first learn the commands by reviewing these PDFs:

Quickstart guide

http://www.cpustick.com/downloads/quickref.v1.90.pdf

and user manual

http://www.cpustick.com/downloads/stickos.v1.90.pdf