OLIMEX© 2014
AVR-T32U4 user's manual
CHAPTER 2 INTRODUCTION TO ARDUINO/PINGUINO/MAPLE
2. What is Arduino?
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform, designed to make the process of using
electronics in multidisciplinary projects easily accessible. The hardware consists of a simple open
hardware design for the Arduino board with an Atmel AVR processor and on-board I/O support. The
software consists of a standard programming language and the boot loader that runs on the board.
Arduino hardware is programmed using a Wiring-based language ( libraries), similar to C+
+ with some simplifications and modifications, and a Processing-based Integrated Development
Environment (IDE).
The project began in Ivrea, Italy in 2005 aiming to make a device for controlling student-built
interaction design projects less expensively than other prototyping systems available at the time. As
of February 2010 more than 120,000 Arduino boards had been shipped. Founders Massimo Banzi
and David Cuartielles named the project after a local bar named Arduino. The name is an Italian
masculine first name, meaning "strong friend". The English pronunciation is "Hardwin", a
namesake of Arduino of Ivrea.
More information could be found at the creators web page
and in the Arduino
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
To make the story short - Arduino is easy for beginners who lack Electronics knowledge, but also
does not restrict professionals as they can program it in C++ or mix of Arduino/C++ language.
There are thousands of projects which makes it easy to startup as there is barely no field where
Arduino enthusiasts to have not been already.
Arduino has inspired two other major derivates - MAPLE and PINGUINO. Based on 8-bit AVR
technology the computational power of Arduino boards is modest, this is why a team from MIT
developed the MAPLE project which is based on ARM7 STM32F103RBT6 microcontroller. The
board has same friendly IDE as Arduino and offers the same capabilities as hardware and software
but runs the Arduino code much faster. The Maple project can be found at
In parallel with Arduino another project was started called PINGUINO. This project chose its first
implementation to be with PIC microcontrollers, as AVRs were hard to find in some parts of the
world like South America so it is likely to see lot of PINGUINO developers are from that part of the
world. PINGUINO project founders decided to go with Python instead Java for processing
language. For the moment PINGUINO is much more flexible than Arduino as it is not limited to
8bit microcontrollers. Currently the IDE, which has GCC in background, can support 8-bit PIC
microcontrollers, 32bit PIC32 (MIPS) microcontrollers and ARM7/CORTEXM3 microcontrollers
which makes PINGUINO very flexible because once you make your project you can migrate easily
through different hardware platforms and not being bound to a single microcontroller manufacturer.
The PINGUINO project can be found at:
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