Hardware

At the core of every Leaf project is a base board. These come in three species: Maple, Oak, and Willow. We'll also be releasing a range of expansion boards over the next few months.

Maple

Our Maple board consists of the essentials: a fast processor with lots of peripherals. At the center of Maple is a 72MHz ARM Cortex M3 chip, providing the increased computational power desired by more advanced users. In the past, ARM processors were notoriously unfriendly in non-professional environments due to proprietary tool chains and unfamiliar instruction sets. Because of this, they were conspicuously absent from classrooms and hobbyists' workbenches. Leaf aims to change this by providing an ARM tool-chain built from open source components and a programming environment that is intuitively easy to use.

For those of us who love and are familiar with Arduino, Maple is offered in an Arduino-compatible format, complete with Arduino pin layouts and programming environment. In the future, a Cortex native version is available in order to take full advantage of this fantastic micro-controller.

Maple Native

Maple Native is identical to the Maple, but we've diverged from Arduino form factor and pin layout. The STM32 is an amazing chip and it deserves a layout that was designed just for it. Maple native includes a silkscreen that labels exactly which pins work with which peripherals, such as I2C and SPI communication, or the analog to digital converter (ADC). With Maple Native, you wont have to dig through schematics or pin mapping charts again. To make things even easier, the pins are arranged to keep peripheral ports together wherever possible. Our extended library makes using any of the STM32's advanced peripherals as easy as blinking an LED.

Oak

Oak is built from the same Cortex M3 foundation as Maple but also boasts a 250k gate Xilinx Spartan 3E, making it the first product in its class to feature an on-board FPGA. This makes Oak a full featured processing platform suitable for robotics, machine vision, surveillance, gaming, and a host of other applications. For users who are unfamiliar with programming FPGAs, LeafLabs offers a wide library of functions that exploit the powerful FPGA architecture. These can be integrated into your project with minimal overhead and without having to get into the down and dirty of learning a hardware description language.

Willow

There will be more information on Willow as it becomes available. The Willow model is in the very early stages of development.