The current manufacturing run of Maples and Maple Minis is done and en route to us. If you’re impatient, you can already buy them from Seeed Studio: Maple and Maple Mini. Regarding distribution, we are (hopefully) no longer going to be selling boards directly from our site any more, and instead will be relying solely on distributors. We’ll keep you guys updated regarding which boards are available where, as that occurs over the next couple of weeks.
Point of interest: these boards should be functionally identical to the previous revisions, but with a couple of minor changes and additions to the silkscreens. Most notably, the silkscreens now indicate a max input voltage of 5V. The power circuitry is unchanged, but there was continual confusion over how much current could safely be pulled at varying voltage inputs, so now the party line is 5V max. If you were safely running off a higher voltage previously, it should still work fine. More information about power regulation on Maple and Maple Mini can be found here. In addition, we pulled off a diode on Maple Mini so the USB 5V line is accessible from the VIN pin. Refer to the schematic for details.
Last but not least, Maple II and Maple Native II designs have been sent out for prototyping! So we should have the first release candidates in our hands within a week or two. We’ll keep you updated.
We’re now officially sold out of Maple RET6s. Thanks to everyone who purchased one! As you may have noticed, this leaves our store page looking rather sad and empty. The reason for this is threefold.
First, as we detailed in this post, we’re in the process of shaking up the Maple line a bit, working on getting some new boards out the door, phasing out others. So Maple RET6 and Maple Native in its Beta form will no longer be available, but keep an eye out for Maple II and Maple Native II (both featuring the STM32 F4 line) in the near future.
Second, we’re just straight up running low on stock. Our apologies! We just ordered a giant batch of Maples and Maple Minis, and we’re expecting to get those in sometime in the next three weeks, so we appreciate your patience.
Third, we’re hoping to move away from selling boards from our own store page, and to instead deal exclusively through our distributors. The overhead of packaging and shipping so many boards is just too intensive for a small shop like ours. Limited/initial/beta runs of boards may still be available on our site, but for the most part distributors are gonna be the place to go. You can definitely hit them up right away to snag a Maple, though Mini is going to have to wait for the new shipment to come in.
Hope that covers any questions or concerns you may have had — leave us a comment if there’s anything we didn’t cover. Thanks for reading!
Hey guys, as you may have noticed, the LeafLabs store is currently running pretty low on stock, and we’ve also been making some vague statements around the forums about the impending move to the F4 line. So, we just wanted to give everybody a quick heads up on where we are in terms of product availability and development.
- Maple r5 is currently out of stock, but please be assured we plan to continue manufacturing and supporting Maple r5 for the foreseeable future. We’ve got another run in production so we should be carrying them again soon. In the meantime, r5 is still readily available from our distributors.
- Maple Mini is also out of stock, and will also be manufactured and supported for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, the Maple Mini is sold out at all distributors at the moment, but we do currently have another run in production, along with the r5s. Expect to see them back in stock within 60 days, maximum.
- Maple RET6 is still available, but once this run is gone we do not intend on manufacturing more. In general, the RET6 is just not terribly popular, and in the future the F4 version should provide the “level up” option that made the RET6 appealing. We’re going to be selling the remaining stock at a sale price of $44.99, so get ‘em while they last.
- Maple Native beta run is over, and we got a lot of good feedback about the board. At this point, our intention is to redesign Maple Native to support the F4 chip, so there’s going to be a gap in availability until the F4 line is ready. A few people have asked about form factor compatibility, in the interest of going ahead and making shields. The current plan is to keep any future models more or less compatible with the beta version. We may end up swapping out the unpopulated 3×16 header at the end of the board for a high density header. If you’ve got concerns about changes, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.
- Maple II is our up-and-coming F4 line board! We’re hard at work retooling libmaple to support F4, and finalizing the hardware design. Expect a post soon with more details on what we’re planning, and a chance for feedback.
- Oak is also still in development — we haven’t forgotten about it, we promise! Unfortunately, Oak development tends to take second fiddle to Maple issues, so progress has been slower than we’d like. At this point, we have a mostly-functional prototype in house and we are working on bringing up all the peripherals. Currently, the plan is also to use an F4 on Oak.
Thanks for your continuing support of LeafLabs and Maple. We hope you’re as excited about the new projects as we are.
Recently, our friends over at Open Music Labs created an awesome little shield for Maple and Arduino they call the Audio Codec Shield. The Audio Codec Shield can pump 44k 16-bit audio samples per second into and out of your Maple sketches. What happens to those samples in a sketch is entirely up to you. The guys at Open Music Labs really went above and beyond and created a great library and set of examples to go along with the Codec Shield. In just a few seconds you can load up an example for a delay effect, a flanger, a tremolo, a sine generator, or an LFO. Overall, the shield is great!
By coincidence, we got one of these shields right around the same time as the Maple Native Beta boards came in. These boards have a full 1MB of external memory, so obviously we had to wire one up to an Audio Codec Shield and see what we could do with it. We were able to change just a few lines from the “fixed delay” example code and turn that 1MB of ram into a full 11 seconds of audio buffer for a loop pedal! Check out the video to see our little Maple Native Looper in action. Sorry for cheesy guitar playing! Check out the code to see how it works, and compare it against the effect.
Have you done anything fun with audio and a Maple? Let us know!
Good news, everyone! LeafLabs and Wiring are teaming up to make a single IDE and libraries that will work on all of our boards!
For those who might not know about Wiring: it’s an awesome open source hardware and software project, the very first to port the Processing environment to work with microcontrollers. Wiring was started by Hernando Barragán of the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, and is headed up by him and a team of volunteers. We think Wiring is fantastic, and we’ve been talking with them for a while about how we might work together.
Well, those talks are turning into reality. Now that Wiring is finished with their their 1.0 release, we’re ready to work together to move the Maple IDE over to Wiring’s. This means that, in the future, you’ll be programming Maple from the Wiring IDE.
As many of you know, there are approximately twenty million Wiring IDE forks, clones, and sister projects out there. It’s like the old story goes: Processing begat Wiring’s IDE, Wiring’s begat Arduino’s, and Arduino’s begat LeafLabs’, etc.
That’s crazy! Open source history is full of examples where too much forking drives everybody nuts, makes for a ton of wasted effort, confusing user experiences, etc. etc. So, instead of adding to the confusion, we’re glad to be putting our efforts towards the mature, well-tested, and continually-evolving Wiring IDE.
Well, you say, that’s all motherhood and the flag, but what about the libraries I use to program my Maple? What’s going to happen to those? Am I going to have to throw everything away? Oh noes! It’s gonna be another Py3K or Perl 6! Run away!
Relax. We don’t want that to happen either. We’re still going to continue developing libmaple on our own, and all of us at Wiring and LeafLabs are committed to maintaining compatibility with previous releases whenever it’s possible.
However, we’re not going to lie to you. The existing code was developed for different architectures, and it’s not going to be possible to achieve 100% compatibility. We’d be selling snake oil if we told you anything different. We’re not trying to turn Maple into Wiring. Instead, we’re lovingly crafting a subset of both of our libraries that will work the same on both of our boards. Since “subset of both of our libraries” is an unappetizing mouthful, we’re calling it the Wiring Framework for short. If you find some random code on the internet that uses only features from the Wiring Framework, you’ll know it works on both Maple and Wiring. However, if you want to use Maple- or Wiring-specific features, those will all still be there.
We hope you’re as excited about this as we are! While it’s still early days, we’ll be sure to keep you posted as things progress.
We got our hands on a few WIZ820ios:
This nifty little beast lets you connect to your Maple to the network. With one SPI and three digital IOs, you have the whole Internet in your hands.
So what’s this good for?
Sometimes, when you’re working on a project, you’ll need a user interface. If you are the only person interfacing with your project, you can throw together a simple serial protocol, where you type a command in the form of a character and then read back a character response. For more elaborate projects, you might find that you want to send longer commands to your device, read back more comprehensive results, or simply present a more beautiful interface. We wanted programmers to be able to generate interfaces that would be simple to use and easily extendable. To that end, we’ve ported and expanded two of Wiznet’s sample projects – a telnet interface and a web server – for the Maple IDE and command line toolchain.
The telnet interface offers a great balance between control and flexibility. Here’s a screenshot of a telnet session with a Maple Mini:
Maybe the command line isn’t your thing. Well, web servers are always cool, with their buttons and text boxes. Here’s an example web server (note: originally a different name was on top, but the legal department advised against it):
Here’s what happens when you press “search”:
There are many ways in which this design can be expanded, and it’s a fun way to get into HTML. The user input is not just limited to reading text. You can also use forms with check boxes, radio buttons or combo boxes.
Want to try this out for yourself? The wizEthernet wiki page will help you get started. We’re looking forward to seeing all the beautiful websites everyone cooks up with this!
Here’s our Maple Mini web server:
Contact webmaster@leaflabs.com with website issues
Powered by WordPress, nginx, Linux, and coffee.
This site intended to be valid HTML 4.01 Strict. Best viewed with any standards-compliant browser.
Copyright LeafLabs, LLC, ©2009-2011.
Unless otherwise noted, all content on this website is released under the
Creative Commons Attribution Licence 3.0
Hello Anonymous! Login?