Pinguino morherboard

Hello everyone,

I am currently in the process of planning the build of my mendel (I have a functioning repstrap), and I am keen to use the BEEF electronics structure, but I am undecided as to which microcontroller to use.

Whilst browsing the web with google's help, I came across the Pinguino. At first glance, this looks like a serious alternative to the arduino offerings, with low parts count (thanks partly to the onboard USB ) and low cost.

The data sheet for the PIC18F2550 reveals possible clock speeds of 48MHz too, which is a vast improvement over the arduino's ATmega1280's 16MHz.

I have not been able to find any reference to anyone having ported the arduino firmware to this microprocessor, so my questions to the forum are:

1. has anyone considered using the Pinguino platform to run the reprap firmware?
2. has anyone ported the reprap arduino firmware to the Pinguino platform?

Thanks,
jmg.

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[emaker.io]

[emaker.limited]

PICs take 4 clocks to do one instruction so they're actually 4x slower than an AVR for the same clockrate. That means, an AVR at 16MHz (16MIPS) is faster than that PIC at 48MHz (12MIPS)! It's MIPS that's important here rather than clockrate.

PICs only have one register vs AVR's 32 so your code ends up taking far more instructions.

I don't know of any free C compilers for PIC that don't suck, probably due to the lack of registers.

Atmel do offer chips with built-in usb but I haven't seen them in the wild much.. not sure why

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Wooden Mendel
Teacup Firmware

Thanks Triffid_Hunter, that makes sense. I'll know what to look for from now on.

As an aside, I'm planning on using your FiveD_on_Arduino firmware in an ATmega328P for my mendel. I know your firmware will fit on a 168, but I'm hoping I can include SD card functionality by putting in onto a 328.

It could take me a while as I'm still learning about programming MCUs, unless it's something you are planning on adding yourself?

It'll happen around the time that someone tries my firmware on a machine with an sd card, then sits down and works out how to shoehorn it in...

I'd suggest taking over serial_rxchars and serial_popchar in mendel.c/main() to start with

As for various microcontrollers, casainho is working on porting FiveD_on_Arduino to ARM, it already has support for atmega644 courtesy of jakepoz pointing out the necessary changes, and it will only take 15 minutes of repetitive work to add atmega1280 or other atmel avr chips to the list.

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Wooden Mendel
Teacup Firmware