ARM-Based Arduino Competitor At SparkFun 106
Gibbs-Duhem writes "The LeafLabs Maple, an ARM device designed to be pin compatible with the Arduino, and with a strikingly similar and familiar development environment, has reached a new milestone — being carried by SparkFun. By swapping the popular 'avr-gcc' compiler with CodeSourcery's 'arm-non-eabi-gcc,' LeafLabs manages to provide a nearly identical programming experience to Arduino despite targeting a completely different architecture. Also, while some Arduino shields are incompatible due to certain capabilities being allocated to different pins, several of them are currently supported and there are more to come."
Other ARM-based Arduinos. (Score:5, Informative)
The Maple aims to be as Arduino-like as possible; even to the extent that you should eventually be able to copy running code from the Arduino IDE, paste into the very similar Maple IDE, hit compile and upload and you're good. It's not quite there yet, but if you're just developing for the Maple it's nice now.
The Cortino is a much more traditional embedded system. It's got an uploader. (Windows executable only.) And, well, that's it. Find your own compiler and runtime. I think I remember finding that the upload protocol was something standard, but I ended up using OpenOCD [berlios.de] and soldering in the JTAG header. One brick wall of a learning curve, but I was so pleased at getting it to blink morse!
The ARMite PRO is the Arduino-footprint offering in a range of boards. They are preloaded with a BASIC interpreter, but solder on a jumper and you can upload via a FTDI USB serial cable. I think it's just the same as the Arduino lilypads.
Fun to play with; I need to get an Xduino now!
Re:none EABI? (Score:2, Informative)
it should be "none", not "non", indicating that this compiler does not target any OS, just a blank EABI slate. The submitter got it wrong