What’s cooking @ e-Gizmo: Episode 2 Arduino and Pinguino clones

Developing a hardware and software is a very costly process, and development costs can bloat the price of any product especially when manufactured and sold in small quantities.

Not too long ago, a few innovators (I suspect they are hobbyists, like us) concocted an idea that turned many traditional business thinkings upside down. It is called Open Source. Open in the sense that all details of a project are published and made public. Furthermore, most authors implicitly allows anyone to copy, modify, and sell for profit an open sourced project without having to pay anything in return.

The idea was originally conceived for software codes only. But hardware designers saw a lot of good things happening with open sourcing, hence quickly followed suit. Some might argue that this model will likely result in inferior products, mainly due to the absence of a strong motivator – monetary reward. But skeptics were proven wrong in countless of instances. Projects that attracted the attention of large group of hobbyists became so successful, and have quality that rivals, if are not better than, those of commercially developed products. These projects are tested and improved by huge numbers of volunteers freely giving their time making suggestions and contributions. The now phenomenally popular Arduino prototyping platform makes a very good example.

Arduino platform

Arduino was built by Massimo Banzi when his students complained that existing commercial microcontroller boards (at that time) were too expensive for their robot projects, not to mention they are a pain to program. Teaming with two other Italian geeks, Gianluca Martino, and David Cuartielles, they build the atmel AVR based programmable microcontroller platform with a matching IDE that made programming much easier.

Visit www.arduino.cc for more details.




Gizduino: Arduino compatible board

The Gizduino board is based on the Arduino Duemilanove ATMega168 variant with some notable difference. Most noticeable is the extended pin connectors that allow the board to be mated with shields not just on top side of the board, but under it as well. You can permanently cut off the extended pins if you don’t find them useful or desirable. Cutting them off may present some mounting inconvenience with a number of shields being developed by e-Gizmo (e.g. Mobot Controller).

Gizduino also uses a USB chip different that of the Arduino. A PL2303 chip is used instead of the FDTI chip used by the original Arduino hardware. This difference will be apparent only during the installations of device drivers, and is generally invisible to the user during actual usage.


Pinguino – PIC based Arduino like platfor

Not to be outdone, a French engineer – Jean-Pierre Mandon – developed his own microchip PIC based Arduino-like platform, calling it a Pinguino. The Pinguino system is also open source, and sports an IDE and simplified C programming functions nearly identical to that of the Arduino. This may turn around some PIC die-hards who dislike Arduino simply because it is not using PIC microcontroller.

The Pinguino IDE uses the familiar SDCC C compiler. Like its Arduino counterpart, advance users have the option mix standard C functions with the Pinguino code, or choose to bypass the IDE and bootloader, and code their program directly in C.

The standard Pinguino board layout, as suggested by the inventor, is slim, and can be plugged on a breadboard. This feature, while having its own merit, is incompatible with our existing Arduino compatible line of shields.

Visit www.hackinglab.org for more details. 


e-Gizmo Pinguino Compatible

prototype of Pinguino with pin layout compatible with Arduino is now being worked on at e-Gizmo. Local experimenters and PIC aficionados can look forward for the availability of this board @ e-Gizmo by the first week of November of this year.