I've been investigating making a low-cost ARM-based Arduino.
As is usual with these things, the act of googling causes it to happen. Over the weekend, I found several interesting links.
A Cortex-M3 board, with Arduino layout, is in prototype, and is called 'Maple': http://blogs.leaflabs.com/?p=91
Maple uses the ST Micro STM32F. The main reduction in functionality compared to mbed is mbed's USB flash drive (Arduino uploads over USB, but uses an upload program), and mbed's Ethernet.
Initial price is $40, but it is one chip (Rapid advertise a 128K/20K device for £3.75 10-off), so it should be comparable to an Arduino/Freeduino, i.e. under $25, or under £20. It'll also get access to the dozens of Arduino daughterboards. Price is critical to me, for my school activities, so, if this works, an under £20 price would win for me.
The Leaf Labs folks are promising a Cortex-M3 + FPGA next, but the 'Maple' Cortex-M3 appears to be there first board, so I have no idea how long that might take.
As well as Leaf Labs, these further efforts are porting the Arduino libraries, and integrating the ARM C/C++ toolchain into the existing Arduino IDE:
- http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2009/08/introducing-illuminato-x-machina.html
- http://www.xduino.com/
- http://github.com/mlu/arduino-stm32/tree/master
There are also a few efforts to produce general purpose libraries like http://sourceforge.net/projects/libopenstm32/ which mbed users might find useful.
Summary: Maple is less powerful than mbed, but I rarely max out a Freeduino, so I think it may be relevant to other mbed users
HTH
GB
Serge Sozonoff.
1 reply
I've been investigating making a low-cost ARM-based Arduino.
As is usual with these things, the act of googling causes it to happen. Over the weekend, I found several interesting links.
A Cortex-M3 board, with Arduino layout, is in prototype, and is called 'Maple': http://blogs.leaflabs.com/?p=91
Maple uses the ST Micro STM32F. The main reduction in functionality compared to mbed is mbed's USB flash drive (Arduino uploads over USB, but uses an upload program), and mbed's Ethernet.
Initial price is $40, but it is one chip (Rapid advertise a 128K/20K device for £3.75 10-off), so it should be comparable to an Arduino/Freeduino, i.e. under $25, or under £20. It'll also get access to the dozens of Arduino daughterboards. Price is critical to me, for my school activities, so, if this works, an under £20 price would win for me.
The Leaf Labs folks are promising a Cortex-M3 + FPGA next, but the 'Maple' Cortex-M3 appears to be there first board, so I have no idea how long that might take.
As well as Leaf Labs, these further efforts are porting the Arduino libraries, and integrating the ARM C/C++ toolchain into the existing Arduino IDE: