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.
A few weeks ago I sent out the inaugural LeafLabs newsletter. For anyone not on our mailing list, here’s a copy of the text:
Hello!
This is the first ever LeafLabs newsletter. We’re going to take the opportunity to sully this historical first with logistics, outlining exactly what we hope these emails will accomplish and what infrastructures we currently have established to help maintain a thriving community.
The Newsletter
In the future we hope this newsletter will contain exciting monthly updates from the actual Leaf Labs– news regarding product releases, software updates, new features on the website etc. We hope also that this newsletter will be a place to highlight cool projects with Leaf boards, developed both in house and by users.
The Infastructure
We begin our tour at the newly launched website, leaflabs.com. You may notice it looks a little sparse, but we’re excited about integrating more features as development progresses. You may want to register on our website; currently registering allows you to sign up for our mailing lists and little else, but in the near future you will be able to preorder boards, participate in forums, sign up to be a beta tester, post projects and a variety of web associated activities. LeafLabs also has a twitter (@leaflabs) and a blog (blogs.leaflabs.com) Finally, if you want to chat about all things Leaf (oh and we know you do), come check out our IRC channel, #leafblowers on irc.freenode.net.
Maple Release
The major update for this incarnation of the Leaf newsletter is the upcoming release of Maple! On October 15th you will be able to pre-order your boards on our website, and on Halloween they will be available via our website and in the future, distributers like Sparkfun.com. Get excited, we know we are.
So concludes your first official correspondence from LeafLabs. Was it as good for you as it was for us?
Until next time,
The LeafLabs Team
As an astute reader may have noticed, the pre-release date for Maple is today!! Order your very own maple here. If you’d like to be added to the newsletter, send us a line at info (at) leaflabs (dot) com or make a request via comments.
This weekend, we set up a microscope, solder paste machine, an oven, and an air compressor. They’re all in this photo. I’m really excited about having the solder paste machine. The first time I tried one, it was as exciting as seeing solder wick onto component leads for the first time (which was immensely exciting). They make soldering high-pin-count components cleaner and easier. We needed the air compressor for the solder paste machine, but we’ll use it for other things too. I’ll be assembling the final version of the Maple prototype here this week before we get a pick-and-placed proof and 100 assembled boards for beta testers.
This is our new cat, Henry.
For those of you who were asking, the current iteration of the Maple prototype is using an STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 processor with 256KB 128K flash memory, 8KB 20KB of RAM.
We’re currently on vacation, so expect a bit of radio silence until next week. Those of you who have requested to be added to our mailing list will soon start receiving our newsletter which will include details about upcoming hardware and software releases and be sent out about once a month. If you’d like to be added to the mailing list, please do so by filling in your email address at the bottom of our main page at http://leaflabs.com (more content there in a bit). More news soon!
This is the Maple prototype, our first version of an Arduino-compatible board with an STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 processor. We’re chomping at the bits to release it as soon as we tie up a couple loose ends to make it what we think it should be. We’ve ported all the Arduino language and are modifying the Arduino environment so that everything works how it should. Notice that Maple does not have an FTDI chip, so serial communication works through a USB Virtual COM Port that’s implemented on the STM32, so it may even be slightly easier to setup than Arduino boards because FTDI drivers aren’t required, and the drivers for the Virtual COM Port are probably already on your Mac or Linux machine; for Windows, you’ll just use the driver that we include with the software download.
We’re also extending the Arduino language to allow users to do things with the STM32 that the Atmega chips cannot do such as easy setting up of different types of USB devices (HID for crazy mouses, mass storage, or full speed USB 2.0 data transfer) and other communication protocols (USART, SPI, I2C, I2S, CAN), providing higher bandwidth capabilities.
To allow people an opportunity to experiment with the performance benefits of Maple, we’re designing a couple shields to stack on. The one I’m most excited about is the audio shield. I love programming real-time audio synthesis and effects processing algorithms and have experimented with these things on Arduino. Audio processing is one thing that can quickly lead to hitting the limitations of the Arduino AVR processors. I like to simulate real-time audio effects processing with MATLAB (though I’m starting to move to Python) by importing an audio file and writing an algorithm that slides a buffer through the audio data as if it were being captured in real-time from a guitar or something. It’s disappointing to create a cool effect that takes too much processing or memory to implement on the embedded hardware you’re using, so I can’t wait to allow people more flexibility here and for other things. Another shield we might do is an OLED display with a little trackball or joystick. I haven’t seen an OLED display shield at a reasonable cost. We’re open to suggestions!
A while back Nadja Oertelt approached us about doing a bit for her show Motherboard on Vice TV. Having seen the show (it’s awesome!) we were psyched about the offer. But, we were unfortunately deep into the prototyping phase of project and had little to show. A few all nighters later we had gotten close to getting three demos working:
1) Autonomous hover with a simple linear feedback controller on an RC plane
2) Programmable guitar pedal
3) Simple video processing on board the FPGA
If only the VBS crew had showed up a day later, we might have had a lot of neat content ready for them. Of course, even the hardest of all night hackfests isn’t enough to bring a fresh board – straight off the soldering iron – to life in such varied, visually compelling ways. At the end of the shoot, all we had to show was the left overs of the weekend devel-o-thon, an RC plane with some not-so-functional electronics, and the prototype boards themselves. Ugh. We were devastated we had messed up this opportunity.
The folks over at VBS did an amazing job turning what we did have into a great piece, which you should watch here. I love what came out of that footage and we owe a big thanks to Nadja for doing so much with so little. To be honest I was somewhat dreading the piece – a misplaced apprehension. I love it.
That said, its a few months and a few prototype revisions later. We have a lot more to show! This time, however, we won’t make the mistake of jumping the gun – we can’t wait to show off some demos once they’re as spit-polished as we’d like. Besides the demo’s, however, we’ve made a ton of improvements on the hardware end of things. We offer the lighter Maple board without the FPGA that is fully arduino compatible. We are really committed to building off the great success of those little boards-in-blue, staying open source and creative commons the whole way! If you like what were up to, drop us a line or sign up for our news letter!
info@leaflabs.com
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