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!
We’ve got our blink on… Python style!
If you haven’t had a chance to check out the specs on Maple Native:
- 72MHz
- 1MB external SRAM
- DACs
- I2Cs
- SPIs
- UARTs
- ADCs
- FSMC
To summarize, its got some junk in the trunk.
Last week we had a meeting to figure out a good way to demonstrate why EVERYBODY will not be able to live without it, and AJ chimes in with: “Has anybody played around with PyMite?”
PYTHON!… on a microcontroller! That you can interact with! At runtime! Tooo good to be true.
Took me a week of randomly banging on a keyboard but yesterday we typed blinky into interactive pymite (IPM) and… let’s just say I’m giddy.
Anyway, we think it might be ready for some users to play around with. It’s still rough around the edges, but if you’ve got a Maple Native or a Maple RET6 Edition and want to partake in some luscious Python goodness, then grab the latest release from our projects repo on GitHub (sorry, but this little slice of heaven is currently only usable from the command line toolchain):
$ git clone git://github.com/leaflabs/projects.git
Then follow the hastily written up instructions on the wiki.
Dave
Maple IDE 0.0.12 is now available for your pleasure.
Changelog
New Stuff
- Support for Maple Native Beta. The Native’s SRAM chip is turned on and accessible by default.
- Dynamic memory allocation working on all boards.
- FreeRTOS support.
- HardwareSPI: pin accessor functions nssPin(), mosiPin(), misoPin(), and sckPin() added.
- Vastly improved documentation for the low-level libmaple library.
Bugfixes
- HardwareTimer::setPeriod() fixed (broken due to a typo in the last release).
- Various fixes to low-level timer support in timer.c.
- RAM builds working again on all boards. (RAM builds were broken on the RET6 boards, see the relevant forum thread here.
Miscellaneous
- stm32.h expanded (and its declarations are more respected elsewhere in the codebase). This makes libmaple more portable to more ST chips.
- Optimized EXTI and timer IRQ handlers.
- Git tags have gone back to “vX.Y.Z” naming conventions, so “v0.0.12-maintenance” isntead of “0.0.12-maintenance”. This seems to be more common practice, and it’s what we used to do. The old branches and tags will still be around, but we’ll keep using the new conventions from now on.
Command line toolchain
- Library folders are added to the include path, so they can be included directly.
- Documentation sources were removed and broken out into their own repository.
- New examples added, others improved.
Deprecations
- usart.h rx_buf field in struct usart_dev is deprecated.
The pointer is accessible via the rb field, so rx_buf is redundant. Having it at all implies that sizeof(struct usart_dev) is not a compile-time constant, which is undesirable. It also makes it impossible to dynamically allocate or reassign the buffer used by the rb field. This field will be removed in the next release. - stm32.h PCLK1, PCLK2, and NR_INTERRUPTS are deprecated. Use STM32_PCLK1, STM32_PCLK2, and STM32_NR_INTERRUPTS, respectively, instead.
Give it a test drive and let us know how it goes!
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