Review

You may have noticed in the schematics I post for various projects that I use KiCAD for all my designs. It's a free and open source package with no limitations on part count, pin count or board size. The software is cross platform, supporting Linux, Mac and Windows, and on Linux you'll probably find it in your distribution's repositories. Unlike the other big open source electronics design software gEDA it is fairly intuitive and not that different from other commerical packages I've used (OrCAD or Altium Designer). Unlike cost free versions of proprietary software like Eagle there are no reasonable limits on the board size, part count or pin count that you can create with this software and while it lacks some advanced features such as more complex curved pad shapes etc. it is very stable now and is well up to commercial work.

The new BeagleBone from Texas Instruments is here! Farnell sent me a review copy this week, and are taking orders. I've prepared a video intro about getting up and running with the new board which is really easy. A few of the highlights are in the review below.

Disclosure: The ChipKit Uno32 for this review was supplied free of charge by Farnell.

Product name: ChipKit Uno32
Price: £17.99 ($26.95)
Supplier: Farnell
Category: Microcontroller development board

The ChipKit Uno32 is a new Arduino-compatible board from Digilent and Microchip, based around a PIC32 MIPS microcontroller. This makes it a vastly more powerful platform than the ATMEGA328 based Arduino Uno, a lot of the press releases about it seem to be claiming that it's the first 32 bit based Arduino compatible, whether or not you consider the Maple to be equally worthy of this title, it has to be said it's a huge leap for the power of the platform.