OggCamp 11: Open Source Hardware - Beyond the Arduino

Submitted by nathan on Sat, 07/23/2011 - 21:34

I'm going to be at OggCamp again this year. I'm planning a talk for the barcamp on open source hardware, particularly hardware more powerful or less well known than the Arduino. The ChipKIT will feature in the talk and hopefully the Pong game will be there for you to play. I'm also going to be bringing a ChipKIT MAX32 for the raffle courtesy of Farnell, so for your chance to win this awesome board, you need to come along.

If you're not yet planning to come check out oggcamp.org and sign up for a free ticket at eventbrite. We'll be camping, for OggCamp this year which should add to the fun and is very reasonable rates.

The prize

Image of the ChipKIT MAX32 development board

Farnell have generously donated a ChipKIT MAX32 board for the event which you can win in the now traditional OggCamp raffle. The MAX32 is an Arduino Mega compatible board based around the PIC32MX processor. It's a MIPS 4K processor with 128K of RAM and 512KB of Flash memory. It has an ethernet MAC built in (although you'll still need a shield with the PHY and connector on, this is due to be ready soon), USB capabilities and loads of user I/O. Most importantly you can get started with it straight away without knowing about microcontrollers using the Arduino abstraction layer.

Talk
The talk was at 12:00 on Saturday in the Barley room (one at the very top of the stairs). The slides are available at the bottom of the page. Thanks to the guys at OggCamp, there is now a video of the talk available to watch on blip.tv, you'll have to listen carefully I'm afraid, maybe I should have spoken up more but it seems to cover the talk reasonably well.