After far too long a wait, Maple is back on sale! You can buy it from us here for the low, low price of $49.99.
We’ve spent the last few months toiling tirelessly to get Maple Rev. 3 out the door, and the day has finally arrived. This release marks drastic redesigns of both the Maple hardware itself, as well as the software toolchain, based on feedback from our first limited run of boards. The most notable updates include our snazzy new low-noise four-layer PCB design, and a new version of a bootloader that should make it easier to get Maple up and running on a wider variety of platforms. We’ve also added support for the in circuit serial programmer, now you can install bootloader updates without any fancy hardware. libmaple has also been completely redesigned and now includes such goodies as hardware SPI and I2C. The IDE has been fully tested on Windows and Linux (32 bit), and in the coming weeks we should be bringing it up to speed on other platforms.
If you have an original board and want the new bootloader, you can get it from our repository. Of course, if you don’t have the necessary JTAG dongle you can send it back to us and well re-flash it for you! Just get it to us and well pay to send it back.
We know you’ve all been waiting for Maple for a really long time, and we can’t express how much we appreciate your continued interest and support for this project. We can’t wait to see what you guys build.
Over coming days and weeks well be showing off some of things we’ve been using Maple’s extra clock cycles for. Perhaps there are even more of these cycles than we originally thought.
Finally I’m pleased to congratulate two members of our team for picking up some sheepskins (degrees) and another who will be going back to school for yet another one.
iperry takes sweet pics:
(uhh d300 obviously, no canon here)
on May 24, 2010 at 8:48 pm
· Permalink
Amazing. I’ve been waiting for another batch to be released for a few months now. w00t
on May 25, 2010 at 1:12 pm
· Permalink
Sweet stuff! Looks fun. I wonder if I could run Android on this (with some decent interfacing hardware) or perhaps Ubuntu for ARM..?
on May 25, 2010 at 7:50 pm
· Permalink
Unfortunately the cortex M3 lacks an MMU, an essential piece of hardware for managing virtual memory for hardcore OS work (like android). I think there are some *nix based kernels that dont need it, and running linux on cortex m3 would be a ridiculous and amazing hack. The beagleboard has a cortex A8 on it, which will definitely run android. Wed love to start playing with that chip.
on May 26, 2010 at 12:10 am
· Permalink
Perhaps it would be more fun to write our own operating systems and routines instead of shoving the ubiquitous Linux on yet another small embedded platform.
on May 26, 2010 at 10:18 am
· Permalink
Oh Peter. Why re-invent the wheel? Linux is a main stream platform for embedded systems. If you want to write your own OS thats fine, but most people would enjoy just using a flavor of Linux. And most people don’t know how to program an OS, but they sure know how to use one.
When you need tools to work on your car, do you build them from scratch?
on May 26, 2010 at 2:28 pm
· Permalink
oh boy……ANYWAY, there are some decent OS’s for cortex m3 out there. They wont run firefox or anything, but freeRTOS and circleOS are both good alternatives. However, IMHO, the great thing about embedded is that youre so close to the metal, that 72MHz feels like an awful lot more, you can direct each one of your cycles to do some exact thing, without some OS abstracting away your system level access.
on July 6, 2010 at 11:54 am
· Permalink
Well, we could always work on a FreeDOS port! W00t!
Let’s run Win 3.1!!!
But in all seriousness, this looks like an awesome board!