Arachnio Due

I've been working hard on the code for this and getting the Kickstarter put together. In order to avoid competing with the many holidays at this time of the year (and give myself some more time to put together the video), I've decided to push the Kickstarter launch back to the beginning of January. In the meantime, check out the draft Kickstarter. I'd love to hear all your feedback on it.

We took the Arachnio Due to the Seattle Mini Maker Faire in the form of a couple of sumo bots based on Jeremy's wifibot project. The bots, with a little maintenance, lasted most of the weekend, which was awesome. Dozens of people took the opportunity to drive the bots and challenge each other in our robosumo ring over the weekend.

We'll get pictures and video up in a couple of days once we've recovered from the weekend. In order to get notifications about the Arachnio Due and a heads-up when our Kickstarter goes live, please sign up for our email list.

After some entertaining yak shaving, I can now compile the Blink sketch and load it onto a prototype Arachnio Due with bossac. I made the not-entirely-awesome decision to place the pin 13 LED right next to the power light, so it's not as clear as I'd like, but you can see the green LED blinking right next to the steady blue.

The yak shaving entailed adding SAM4S support to bossac. First challenge was configuring mingw to compile it, which mostly just meant futzing around with my path. The only reason it was challenging is because I was convinced there must be something more to it, so I investigated that rather than doing the trivial thing.

Luckily, there has been some motion towards adding SAM4S support, so I just built from that and made sure that the SAM4S2 was on the list of supported architectures. You can check out my modifications here: https://github.com/logos-electromechanical/bossa/tree/arduino. I've submitted it as a PR to the bossa mainline, so hopefully it gets picked up and I don't have to ship special tools with the Arachnio Due package.

Thibaut has been doing some really awesome stuff on the core, which is the really big part of this puzzle. It looks like I will be able to get the Arachnio sumo bots up and running for Seattle Mini Maker Faire the weekend after next!

I've just added some pictures of the new prototypes. The assembled Arachnio Due passed its smoke test, and I'm helping Thibaut get the core up to the point where I can start testing more functions.

The Arachnio Due is finally coming together. The biggest boost I've received over the past few months is from Thibault Viard, who is currently porting the Arduino core to work with the Atmel SAM4S series, which gives me access to a much better processor. You can check out his code here: https://github.com/aethaniel/ExperimentalCore-sam

I've been working more on porting the Arduino WiFi library to work with the AT command mode of the ESP8266. I tossed out my earlier attempts and restarted it as a driver-level re-write. I've implemented everything but UDP, but I haven't tested much of it yet. You can check it out here: https://github.com/logos-electromechanical/WiFiESP

I am hoping to unveil it publicly as the Seattle Mini MakerFaire in September, and go live on Kickstarter soon after.

Well, the Kickstarter flamed out a bit short of half way funded. This makes me sad, but I have a new plan.

The most common question I received was asking why the Arachnio had an AVR rather than an ARM... and the most common comment was criticizing me for not using one. I took that to heart, and I'm in the process of designing a new version of the Arachnio, the Arachnio Due. It will feature a SAM3S series microcontroller running at 64 MHz for a major boost in computing power at no change in cost.

I'm working on the layout right now and I will be posting more updates as they become available.

Late last week, I got the prototypes for the latest revisions of the Arachnode and the ArachnoProto. I'll be getting another spin of the core Arachnio late next week to roll in some things that I found I wanted with the ESP8266 connections during testing and development. In particular, I cut out a couple of unnecessary programming connections and added a jumper to allow the 32u4 to reset the ESP8266 if necessary.

Today was a gorgeous day here in Seattle, so I took some pictures outside. It turns out natural sunlight makes everyone, even me, a better photographer.