Maddog in Campus Party Valencia

Maddog was here yesterday to celebrate the commemoration of 20 years of Linux. Of course we were there and we took a photo to celebrate with him and all the Campuseros this birthday.

Campus Party Workshop

Hi Guys



Pinguino workshop is more and more active. We are working on communication with sensors with Pinguino32. Infra-red communication is OK, we can now transmit messages with an infra-red led and receive them with a TSOP module. We are going to share the code today on the blog.
Today is our last session, we prepared some code to connect Pinguino32 each other, with IR, Zigbee module and finally, the communication activity will be monitored through a Linksys router with OpenWRT. Benoit is working on a graphical application with processing to display the communication activity.



As usual, Boops is working hard, day and night..........

Pinguino in the Microchip's Academic Program Newsletter

Pinguino is presented in the last Microchip Academic Program Newsletter. Yet another way to support this project for Microchip.
You can download the letter on the Microchip website.

Have fun
JP

Happy new year 2011 !!

Hi Guys,

2010 was a very good year for Pinguino and it's a pleasure to see how this project evolve. I remember the first version, it is not so far, and I am pleased to see that the beta 9-05, even if it is not perfect, is a working version and help to build many different things. This job was done with many contributions, reports and ideas. Each user, in its own way, is a contributor and help to make this tool more friendly and powerful.
I announced, a long time ago, Pinguino could be ported to 32 bits Microchip micro-controller, and now it's done. This feature don't stop the 8 bits development, but it's a new major improvement for this platform. I think 2011 should be again a good year for Pinguino.
Many thanks to you, guys.
I wish you a fantastic year, keep cool and stay connected with us.....
And if you are a new user, Welcome !!

PinguinoX Preview

Pinguino Beta 9-05 Preview

Pinguino beta 9-05 is almost ready. Changelog is very long but you can see here some of the new functions.

Have fun
JP

Pinguino32X pinout

This is the first pinout for Pinguino 32 bits. The digitalw.c library is in progress.
74 I/O on this board !!

Pinguino PIC32

Now development is really started on PIC32. We are working with the UBW32 board and Brian ( designer of this board ) like the idea of Pinguino with his UBW32 board.
This board is cheap and can be purchased on the net.
We are developing some libraries to release Pinguino with PIC32 support. At the beginning, only digital I/O and serial will be implemented, some peripheral libraries will be easy to port ( servo, LCD ).

Pinguino beta 9-04

Pinguino beta 9-04 is now online with CDC support !!
http://www.hackinglab.org/pinguino/download/latestpinguino/

As usual, i didn't write a documentation :-) but a cdc example is in the
example folder.
What is CDC ?
A CDC is an USB serial port, on windows it will appear in the system as a
virtual com port ( COM7 for example ),
in linux, it will appear as a /dev/ttyACM0 device ( or /dev/ttyACM1 if 0
exist ).

Then you can use this device with a serial terminal ( hyperterminal,
teraterm on windows, putty, gtkterm on linux ).
Speed is 115200 bauds, 1 stop bit, no parity.

In Pinguino, you can use CDC.print(string,length) and CDC.read(string).
CDC.read(string) return the length of the received string.
length=CDC.read(receivedstr);

CDC is a non blocking device, USB is managed with interrupt, so you can use
all the functions in the loop.
No initialisation is needed.

I tested this code on:
windows XP,
windows 7,
linux.

With Linux be careful !! on some distribution, the modem manager send an
initialisation string to a new connected ttyACM device.
This string is:
AT+GCAP
AT+GCAP
AT+GCAP

i am working on a udev rule to stop this initialisation with Pinguino.
You can stop the modem manager if it is a problem
sudo killall modem-manager

Hope this code will be useful for the Pinguino community.
I wait for your report and suggestion.

Thanks to all the alpha-tester :-) of this release:
olivier
boops
vasi
sphynx
paintitblack
walterleonardo
pinguinoVE

Pinguino 9-02

Hi guys,

Due to a bug in the serial module, Pinguino beta 9 is updated.
( Thanks Alejo for this useful report ).
You can download the last release ( beta 9-02 ) here.

Pinguino Beta 9

Hi Guys,

Pinguino beta 9 is available in the download area.
Many thanks to all the contributors of this new release.

This is a major version with a lot of improvement.
I will write some document to explain how to develop users libraries
( it's easy with beta 9 ) and maybe changes from the last version.

Have fun with this new version.

JP

Pinguino New GUI

This is the new GUI of Pinguino. GUI is finished and i am working on libraries.
Servos library from Sphynx is already available, now working on the sdcc 2.9.0 integration in Pinguino.

JP

Pinguino Workshop in Campus Party Valencia

Benoit will animate a workshop with Pinguino in Campus Party Valencia. The theme of this workshop is 'Home Hacking and Pinguino'. We will show how to hack a Linksys router (WRT54GL), connect it to Pinguino with a simple level converter and drive it with LUA and our new libezV24 binding for LUA.
Campus Party is a great event and a nice place to show what is possible. All the contributions will be welcomed.

Benoit website
Campus Party website

Pinguino Beta 8

Pinguino beta 8 is available in the download area, this version is multi-language.

A lot of contributors helped me for this version:

Joan Espinoza initiated the pinguino translation pack
Wim Heirman ( german translation )
Marin Purgar ( croatian translation )
Vasile Guta Ciucur ( Romanian translation )
Raul Zanardo ( install shell on Linux )
Ivan Ricondo ( Pinguino tutorial )
Furri ( windows debugging during Campus Party )
Benoit Espinola ( MAC OSX debugging )

I probably forgot people but this community become increasingly large !!

Hope this new version will be useful............

Zigbee shield for Pinguino

I work on a zigbee shield for Pinguino. I chose the Microchip MRF24J40MA because it is very cheap ( less than 10€ in France ). I designed this board to convert 5V signals to 3,3V.
Now i am working on the driver, i wrote a soft SPI library for Pinguino. Maybe Pinguino will be used as a remote control with this module.

Still in Madrid :-)

I'm still in Campus Party today. All flights are cancelled from Madrid to Marseille, so i take this time to post on the blog.
Campus Party is a really nice event. I met a lot of people, some of them are Pinguino users and it's a chance to work with them for those 4 days. Others are just curious about our project, i tried to explain what are the differences beetween this project and Arduino and what are the advantages.
I received a nice Pinguino from Javi who is one of the ARDE Pinguino designer. I spent most of my time to interface LUA and Pinguino and speak with Paco (Furri) who is a very enthusiast user.
I never participated in a so big event in the past, but the Campus Party organisation is very professional and everything is done to let you spend your time to speak and exchange with people.
I will like that events like this one exist in France.
You can see some of the pictures of Campus Party and Madrid here.

So, thanks to everybody and congratulations to Campus Party.

Pinguino in India

Vijay Anand from india sent us a picture of its Pinguino.



Nice job Vijay.

Pinguino Eagle

Benoit Espinola designed an eagle version of the simplified 2550.

It will be available soon for download.

Pinguino on a proto-board

Cristian from colombia built its pinguino on a proto-board.

Its Pinguino 2550 works with the bootloader V2.

Alpha beta 7 upgraded

It seems that there was an error in the tar.gz file of beta 7.
This file was upgraded now.

alpha beta 7 for Linux available

This version offer full support of 18F4550.
I work on packaging for windows and MAC OSX.

download alpha beta 7 for linux, see examples folder to see how to use 18F4550.

Reports are welcome.