Some of you may have noticed that there has been a store page flickering on and off on our blog. Yes, it’s pre-order season.
We had a few kinks left with paypal, but they should be straightened and now you can pre-order your very own Maple! But why, you may ask?
Well, most relevant to you, we are only getting 100 boards on this first run. If you really want a Maple you might want to pre-order. You’ll get the board at the same time and not risk them selling out. Also, we are really interested in gauging the interest in this first round of Maple, and we figured the number of pre-orders and how fast the boards sell would be a decent proxy. This kind of info will be a factor in deciding how many to run for the next run of Maple and Maple Native.
Also, if you’ve tried to pre-order a board and paypal told you it was sold out…. paypal lied. Now that things are worked out, you should be able to pre-order a board here.
PS. For waiting so nicely, here’s a pretty picture of the old prototype:
(The release version differs in that power selection is made using a jumper, between standard barrel jack / USB power / LiPo batter, there is a larger external header to connect to all the external I/O pins not used by the Arduino pin-compatible layout and minor changes have been made to the silkscreen and layout.)
okie edit:
Here’s a picture of the third (we care a lot about getting it right) prototype for Maple. It has no soldermask or silkscreen because these barebones PCBs are cheap and Advanced Circuits ships them the next day. The layout on this one is a lot better than the one in the picture above. The traces have more direct routes, the microcontroller is closer to the pins in the Analog section so that those trace lengths are minimized, and those traces are also farther apart to minimize crosstalk. The LiPo/Li-Ion battery charger on the board seems to work well. I’ve been repeatedly charging and discharging a LiPo battery. It charges it from nearly completely dead in about 20 minutes. A red LED means that a battery is connected and is charging, which you can do by USB power, a wall adapter, or another DC power source greater than 5V. When the battery is charged, a green LED comes on. The charging component is pretty smart in measuring the battery and determining when and how to charge it. It’s probably used in cell phones, media players, etc.
The components on the boards that are going out for preorders are machine placed. The pads are gold plated. The soldermask is deep red like the leaves of a maple tree in the late fall. There aren’t a lot of things much better than working with beautiful hardware on a crispy cool fall night.
Here’s a screen capture of it:
This also has alternate header pads that are in standard 0.1″ spacing with the other headers for those who also like perf board.
on October 15, 2009 at 8:48 pm
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Ughhhh, mega fail on the out of stock issue. I’m all for going out of stock 3 minutes after opening the page up for orders, but instead paypal was just misleading us! Anyway, limited stock available, and the page is working now, the first board run has been submitted for manufacture, hooray!
on October 15, 2009 at 11:08 pm
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You have got a very interesting product here…
I was wondering, do you have any more detail on the Maple Native. The Arduino layout really isn’t a selling point for me, and I was just wondering what the differences were between the two?
Cheers.
on October 16, 2009 at 5:31 pm
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Mitch, Maple Native is going to be made to make using the STM32 as easy as possible. So the pins will be labeled according to their names in the STM32 datasheet (PA1, PA2, etc.), and we will label the peripherals (SPI, USART, I2C, etc.) that are available on each pin. What Arduino did with the Atmega168 is what we plan to do with Maple Native. First, we take all of the processor’s basic functionality and wrap it up into a function library that’s simple and consistent enough to store in your head after using it a couple times, and then we make the board so that you almost never have to look at a datasheet or documentation for a code library that is hundreds of pages long.
on October 22, 2009 at 9:09 pm
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I know you haven’t even shipped your first board yet, and I feel terrible asking but I noticed that ST has a new processor – STM32W, with the “W” designating on-board wireless and I was wondering if you have given any thought to making this chip available in the Maple? I sound really greedy, don’t I…
on November 9, 2009 at 3:34 am
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The STM32W looks like a neat chip, but…and correct me if I’m wrong, ST hasn’t announced a version yet that runs above 8MHz…which makes me cry a little inside. However, we’re strongly considering throwing this onto a shield to be a generic wireless interconnect. Also up for debate is native wireless support on Oak…should it be bluetooth, xbee, non existent?
on November 9, 2009 at 3:37 am
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Ugh, my bad, make that 24MHz according to the latest literature from ST
http://www.st.com/stonline/products/promlit/pdf/sgmicro0909.pdf
on November 4, 2009 at 6:00 am
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Hi, any pics of the production released boards?
on November 7, 2009 at 4:19 am
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So, the main Maple webpage says:
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To Buy
Maple is currently not for sale, but for pre-order. The official release date for Maple is October 31, 20008.
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Now *that* gives new meaning to PRE-order.
Even Microsoft doesn’t pre-announce products 18,999 years in advance…! Or -1 years in advance, for that matter….
on November 7, 2009 at 4:21 am
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Er, 17999 years… that’ll teach me to do math in my head while laughing that hard.
on November 7, 2009 at 5:59 pm
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Does anyone know if the forums are working? I, along with about 200 others it seems, have all viewed the various fora but are unable to post anything in them.