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Monday, August 10, 2009

FreeJALduino/Pinguino

FreeJALduino is another PIC based Arduino. Initiated by Funlw65 ( vasi ), the goal is to build a PIC based board compatible with Arduino shields.
Originally made to work with JAL ( just another langage ), it would be used with Pinguino.
I work on Pinguino and FreeJALduino compatibility.

Nice project Vasi and good idea, congratulations.

Vasi website

3 comments:

Vasile Guta-Ciucur said...

Thank you Jean-Pierre with your valuable support.

This board would not be "Arduino" without your Pinguino support.

Sebastien Lelong from jallib development team come with an idea to have a Jaluino/Arduino like board so, I come up with my own prototype. At that time, I had the inscription "Jaluino/Pinguino" on the board.

But they said a JAL based development board should have his own design and not Arduino's design. so I named it FreeJALduino (to not upset anyone).

I see this board (with your Pinguino support) as a bridge between AVR and Microchip PIC microcontrollers, allowing migration in both direction (as your board is doing already).

I still hope this board will be supported also by Jallib dev. team because JAL is a great programming language, very easy for beginners.

Jean-Pierre MANDON said...

Hi vasile, i found the idea of a common design very good because it can use the same shield. And the idea of using Pinguino as a JAL development tools is very good too.
The goal of Pinguino project is to help beginners to discover embedded programing with an easy set of tools. Of course, it is not restrictive, this is why i try to give help to work with codeblocks or to use interrupts. I think it can show that it is easy to build a lot of system and it is a good introduction to C langage.
The goal of Pinguino is to integrate a lot of auxiliary tools ( I2C, SPI, 1WIRE etc... ) to be a good test platform. User interrupt were implemented in beta 5, I2C and eeprom WR are in beta 6 ( quite ready ), SPI and flash write and read routines will be implemented in beta 7.... and more
Some users worked on LCD, GPS that i will integrate in fine in the IDE.

Sebastien Lelong said...

Hi guys,

I may jump in this discussion and provide some thoughts about Jaluino. First version of Jaluino is out, see http://jallib.blogspot.com/2009/08/building-jaluino-v10.html .

As Vasi said, we (at jallib) did not try to make shields compatible with original Arduino's. Not because we absolutely wanted it our own way, but mainly due to quite different features between ATMega & PIC. I doubt this can be done; for instance, if a shield uses like 5 PWM channels, how to get this with a PIC like 18F2550, or 18F4550 ? Using a soft impl. of PWM ? It won't be as accurate as a built-in hardware PWM module, which usually is requirement, and will require lots of cycles/power/computation. We also wanted to provide a board with more pins, thus the use of 18F4550. That's why we decided to go this way, or not provide compatibility. Of course, we can be wrong, so I'd like your input on this.

As an alternative, I was also thinking about providing a compatibility shield, a layer between Jaluino & Arduino...

Cheers,
Seb