Devices

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.

The Maple

This board has all the essentials: a fast processor with lots of peripherals. At the center of Maple is a 72MHz ARM Cortex M3 chip; in the past ARM processors have been notoriously unfriendly in non-professional environments due to proprietary tool chains and unfamiliar instruction sets. LeafLabs aims to change this by providing an ARM tool-chain built from open source components and a programming environment that is 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. Read more…

• Dual I2C and SPI ports
• 3 USART Serial ports
• 7-channel DMA
• Low power and sleep modes
• Integrated LiPo battery charging
• Dimensions: 2.05″x2.1″ (5.21×5.33cm)
• Starting price: $50
• Extensive documentation

• STM32F103RB: a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor at 72Mhz
• 20KB RAM and 128KB Flash
• Dedicated USB port for programming and communications
• 37 General Purpose pins
• 16 Analog inputs at 12-bit resolution
• 15 PWM pins at 16-bit resolution

The 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.

• 5 USART Serial ports
• 7-channel DMA
• 45-pin FSMC connected to an optional external RAM chip, but also run out to headers with chip select
• Low power and sleep modes
• Integrated LiPo battery charging
• Dimensions: TBA
• Starting price: $TBA
• Extensive documentation will be available

• STM32F103ZE: a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor at 72Mhz
• 64KB RAM and 512KB Flash
• Dedicated USB port for programming and communications
• Many General Purpose pins
• 21 Analog inputs at 12-bit resolution
• 2 DACs (analog output) at 12-bit resolution
• Many PWM pins at 16-bit resolution
• 2 I2C and 3 SPI ports (some with i2s compatibility)

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.