After a tense 30 day inventory gap after the complete sellout of Maple Rev3, we have finally completed the first fab run of Maple Rev5! The new design incorporates a few changes that our users have been asking for – compatibility with 1/10″ spacing (meaning shields can be made out of proto-board or breadboard instead of expensive custom PCB’s) on the additional header and the analog supply has been broken out on the power header for low-noise applications. Additionally, we made some improvements to the silkscreen that we think you will find useful. Testing and flashing is completed on these boards, and we will start shipping them out very shortly (~Nov. 13)! Unfortunately, much of this batch has already been purchased in volume by independent groups and distributors, leaving us only 50 boards! The good news is that we have already ordered the next batch, which should be about 35 days out. The bad news is that this will almost certainly mean another inventory gap, so if you want a board for Christmas this year, head over to the store page soon.

We have some other projects on the way to heighten brighten your holiday season even more. Maple Mini is in its final testing stages, and we will be getting the first 200 of these boards in shortly. Target price for these boards is in the 33$ range, and because the first run is a pretty small one we will likely put them up for pre-order as soon as were satisfied with the production samples. Maple Native is also on its way to fab, and our programming tools have been expanded to fully support both of these new boards.

Speaking of software tools, we’ve begun dog-fooding our pre-alpha version of the new IDE! Whats new about it? First off its all written in python, from the ground up. The interface is the same as what youre used to, and all our command line tools will still be available. But this new frontend is more stable, extensible, and most importantly – hackable than its java predecessor, forked from the Arduino project. My favorite new features? optional Emacs keybindings, and improved compiler and debug reporting. The serial interface is substantially improved as well.

On the libmaple side, we’re finishing up a comprehensive interface for Direct Memory Access (DMA). This core feature of the stm32 allows for data to be copied asynchronously, without incurring the performance cost of code that busies the processor by reading data from A and writing it to B. The DMA allows you to do things such as creating magic buffers that are always filled with the latest readings from the ADC, or configuring the I2C to write out a whole swath of data, whilst your program can go off and do other things. The DMA even allows for your code to copy data between two local memory buffers asynchronously. In a lot of ways, it feels like threading – but restricted to memory copy and data transfer operations.

Because of the addition of DMA support, previously unavailable features of other peripherals will become usable. For example, hardware I2C, advanced ADC configurations, and fast asynchronous serial channels will open new opportunities for higher performance in your applications.

We are excited to see how you put all these things to use and we’re putting some tutorials together to help get you started. For example, how to drive a VGA monitor to make a pong game, how to create a 20 channel synthesizer capable of reproducing the famous THX deep note, and how to build a 44KHz 16bit in/out programmable audio effects pedal! Stay tuned!