AXE and ardweeny?

Dippy

Moderator
This device has been brought to my attention. (No, I have no links and am not on any commission).

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320600025363

Looks like something worth investigating.
Can it be used with existing shields? I have no experience of Arduino at all.

Maybe the company will be looking into special shields as they have obviously designed it with PICAXE in mind?

Anyone tried it?
Looks neat and certainly looks more integratable than all other PICAXE boards I've seen.

PICAXE meets Arduino eh.
 

ciseco

Senior Member
You beat me out of the blocks there, we only did the listing this morning!

I'll be brutally honest, not every shield is going to work. We have made sure similar pins are in identical places. SPI, serial RX/TX most of the ADC's etc. So you should be in with a very good chance.

Having the SPI pins where there are means boards like LCD's, Ethernet etc will go straight on, something I don't think any other Arduino shaped PIC board will do. Any kind of real show stopper, I promise we'll make either a converter or similar shield that will work and fix the issue. We love the PICAXE and will do our utmost to try get as wide a range of add on as there is for the Arduino.

Here's the pin out matings for the 28x1

Code:
'P0 - IN1          15 - NOT CONNECTED
'P1 - IN2          14 - GND
'RST               13 - IN3/SCI/SCK
'3V3               12 - IN4/SDA/SDI
'5V                11 - IN5/SDO 
'GND               10 - SERIAL OUT
'GND               09 - OUT7
'VIN               08 - OUT6

'A0 - ADC0         07 - OUT5
'A1 - ADC1         06 - OUT4
'A2 - ADC2         05 - OUT3
'A3 - ADC3         04 - OUT2
'A4 - SERIN        03 - OUT1
'A5 - IN0          02 - OUT0
'                  01 - TX/IN6 (SWITCHED ON BY 08 HIGH)
'                  00 - RX/IN7 (SWITCHED ON BY 08 HIGH)


If anyone wants the schematics to build their own, I'll happily post them up.

Miles
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iolite portable vaporizer
 
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MFB

Senior Member
This is certainly a very interesting product that should really help with PICAXE based modular hardware development. Unfortunately, it will not allow the same level of modular software development provided by the Arduino. The latter’s supports object oriented programming which enables open source library functions to be easily included. The increasing success of this microcontroller has much to do with the rapid growth of the Arduino community and its willingness to share resources like GPS parsing, LCD and SD card interface liberies etc. For example, SparkFun provide Arduino interface code for most of their smart sensors.

I consider the PICAXE Basic to be much easier to get started with than the cut-down C++ language used by the Arduino (all those curly brackets!). However, it does offer the performance of a true compiler, and with access to all that open source software, the Arduino would be a better choice for those more complex projects.
 

Dippy

Moderator
Let's not confuse soft and hard.
Let's not compare languages.

Many here know how to programme in C but the point of this is that allows plug'n'nearly play :) The language is irrel wrt modular hardware.
And I don't think it pretends to be an Arduino clone.

The point of many shields is they have on-board thingies so your main base simply does simple comms.
If you have easy comms to firmware e.g. GLIC and Rev-Ed LCD chip then the programming language is secondary (or even less).
 

ciseco

Senior Member
MFB you are right to make mention of this. There is a get out of jail free card for just this situation.

The XINO for PICAXE is identical to XINO for PIC. When using a straight PIC you can use any flavour of compiler you wish, BASIC, C++, PASCAL, assembler etc

For example the 28x2 is an 18F25K20, the PIC version happily supports the bare 18F25K20 (and many more). There are a couple of very good UK BASIC's that add such functionality, one of which just happens to work on the 25K20 PIC and is free to download.

As to more complex projects, the 25K20 is more powerful than the AtmelMega328 and certainly there are better compilers than the toolchain under the Arduino IDE.

I'm not doing the Arduino down, we just need to compare like for like here, we use both everyday, it comes down to what you feel comfortable with really.

I agree I hate those squirly brackets too :D

Dippy makes a really good point, this isn't really an Arduino competitor, it's just a board that you can use Arduino shields on a PICAXE

Regards

Miles
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Chevrolet Advance Design history
 
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ciseco

Senior Member
Looks like a really good link when I get 10 I'll go through it, do you do a lot on the Arduino?
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Sambar
 
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MFB

Senior Member
I have only really just started to use the Arduino but first impressions are that it is definitely more difficult to learn C++ than Basic and that, although the PICAXE is great for small projects, those that require multiple smart sensors, mass storage and networking would best be undertaken using the Ardiino’s. Because of its access to the rapidly expanding open source library that should make the development of complex systems more efficient. The initial time spent learning object oriented programming will therefore pay off in the longer- term.

Books that provide good examples of the move towards open source software and hardware for embedded applications are:

Practical Arduino, by Oxer and Blemings
Making Things Talk, by Tom Igoe
Getting Started with Arduino, by Massiom Banzi
 

ciseco

Senior Member
Cool, I can see why you'd want to make the switch to a more potent language, floating point, var passed procedures, includes and plenty of proper variables do make the programmers life an awful lot easier.

Those brackets, the layout and the cost of the 328's, i'm just not sold on the arduino, the IDE is pretty awful too, the other guys here use them a lot. The best thing is the scale of use and the wealth of code you can find. I still prefer the PIC over the atmel (costs 3 x what a good PIC does) so I'm just about to tinker with swordfish on a xino, it's aimed to be the best of both worlds, it's kind of C-ish in many ways but uses BASIC syntax, so no silly brackets and voids. There's libraries for alsorts of stuff. I know there's one or two others on here that use it. It's not got much of a user base though and if you go over 256k in RAM it costs ?99. Would be nice if the pricing was sliding rather than FREE straight to full price.

Anyway I digress, you make note of mass storage and networking, surely theres an SD jobbie for picaxe? I'm trying to mate a WIZNET 5100 with a picaxe to do networking, it might be a stretch too far but hey it's worth a stab :)
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no2 vaporizer
 
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MFB

Senior Member
The main attraction of the Arduino for me is that it does have a large and rapidly increasing user base and open-source code library. It’s a bit like the old PC assembler -v- high-level language discussions of many decades ago, which resulted in a move to ever higher levels of abstraction. I think this will also be the case with embedded applications as the performance of microcontrollers increases. After all, PC programmers accepted the advantages of object oriented programming many years ago.
 

ciseco

Senior Member
Agreed, there's almost an example for everything you can think of and everyone shares, thats probable why it's got more following than anything else (amateur wise). I've always thought that the picaxe could reach more people if only examples were easier to find, and the envelope was pushed a bit, a wiki maybe and some step by step tutorials.

Are you into automation at all? we are building a pile of open source code that allows anything to talk to anything else in a really simple manner, so far we have code running on PC, winCE/phone, arm, TI CC1110's, picaxe, PIC & Arduino, always looking for help :)
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Ford F-650 history
 
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MFB

Senior Member
Apart from making a few tutorials like postings to the PICAXE User-Projects section, I have not made any ‘open-source’ contributions. However, once up to speed with the curly brackets, I hope to submit code and hardware designs to the Arduino community. I did spend some (paid) time working in the field of industrial robotics but my current
interest is instrumentation for hobby projects like (amateur rockets and RC model aircraft etc).
 

Dippy

Moderator
Why not use PIC compiler and make something for a fraction of the Arduino cost? Don't forget your semi-colons ;)
 

tinyb

Member
As a teacher I like the ease of use the picaxe offers. I move to the picaxe from native pics as I was introduced to pics using a graphic based asembley program (corechart) - this was fustrating when dealing with analog, serial and anything else that wasn't simple digital interactions. With picaxe the students were able to do quite complex process easily. Good documentation ment the students could go along way with little further instruction.

Just getting into the world of Audrino as there were some projects my students wanted to do but it would have required too much development time with the picaxe (my time). So bought the Audrino boards and sheilds. Like the concept, like th epug and nearly play nature of the systems developed by the community - hate the programming (semi colons are the death of the students). Students have found it difficult to follow the programming. Too much black boxing and cut and paste. I move to the picaxe to black box some of the coding and function but the students still need to develop an understanding of the chips function.

The board for sale is exactily what I was considering building for school. Can use all the shields as plug and play (have used a few with connecting wires) and the picaxe coding. Shame they are only for sale to UK people. Is there any chance of this changing?

thanks
tiny
 
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ciseco

Senior Member
Hi,

Australia is no problem. Glad you reminded me of oz I need to send something to Grahame at PIC projects, now there's a good site, bit more like the arduino world but on the PIC. There's plenty of pictures and all sorts of code, it's nice because everyone uses their own flavour of compiler and there's none of this my language is better than xyz, I wish someone in the UK had the time to do something similar.

Miles
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Modular engine
 
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tinyb

Member
Looking at the ebay.co.uk link at the start of this thread there is only the 2.50 for UK and no international. :confused:
Ordering one now anyway.
thanks
tiny

Edit: looked at the ad version of the product and it had the international packaging price on it
 
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ciseco

Senior Member
Tinyb, glad it arrived safe and well and that you are pleased. Are those bricks a bit like phidgets? They are a very good price.

Miles
 

tinyb

Member
Tinyb, glad it arrived safe and well and that you are pleased. Are those bricks a bit like phidgets? They are a very good price.

Miles
Yes, they are similar (phidgets link). Their are many others like these from DF Studios. I like the ease of use and the ability to start teaching programing / electronic interfacing with our soldering and bread boarding (sorry Stan and WestAussie). I have used Stans Brain Box hack with students from year 3 up.
Also when I do breadboard the use of the protoshields and kits eg Sparkfun and DFStudios will make it easier. I will post one day the tutes and setup I have for the SEB (AXE092).

As an aside - the new bot120 has an SA connection. The Company is Microbric. Met the guy when he was just starting out. Had a electric shock timer (how long could you hang on) my students loved beating my time - I did it first with new batteries and then the batteries started dying in the end. He released through the local paper the i-bot and the next year the Ai2, DrA and SABorn might remember them? I gave away my 30 sets of each - might have come in handy now?

Stan - is it possible to get a copy of that article? it looked interesting from the 6 lines. I have the Ethernet and wifi shields for the Arduino, I want to interface them with the xino. See how I go

thanks
Richard
 
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ciseco

Senior Member
Tinyb I started to attempt a port for the Wiznet DF board but the XINO I had was an early one with a 28x1 on and I couldnt get at the proper SPI pins as one is the programming pin. Hippy made some mention of it maybe possible to turn it on with an SFR but didnt know for sure if it was possible. Apparently the X2 you can get at it. I've not tried since, sure would be nice to add ethernet for such little money.

What ethernet/wifi boards do you have?

Miles
 

ciseco

Senior Member
Just noticed you'd linked to them, cool so we have the same ET card, ouch that wifly card isn't pocket money :)

If the PICAXE isnt upto driving the 5100, we did have a thought to make an XBee sized ethernet to serial adapter so it could use the XBee port, this is however a long way off and would cost more than the 5100 (we thought of the Stellaris 6965 Arm perhaps)
 
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