SparkFun Electronics - USB 32-Bit Whacker - PIC32MX460 Development Board

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Product Info

USB 32-Bit Whacker - PIC32MX460 Development Board

sku: DEV-08971

Description: Based on the work of Brian Schmalz, the UBW32 is a small development board for the new PIC32MX460F512L 32-bit CPU from Microchip. The UBW32 is breadboard friendly and includes all the external circuitry to get the PIC32 up and running. Power can be provided over USB or from an external source. It has 3 push buttons (Reset, and 2 user-defined buttons) and 5 LEDs (Power, USB, and 3 user defined LEDs). All of the 78(!) of the PIC32's I/O pins are broken out. The board comes pre-loaded with a USB bootloader and special UBW firmware that accepts simple serial commands to control the various I/O functions.

If you have used a UBW or Arduino before and are frustrated by the lack of CPU power, lack of memory, lack of I/O pins, or lack of sophisticated software, the UBW32 is just what you are looking for! While only slightly more expensive than the 8-bit UBW, the UBW32 has significantly more I/O and CPU horsepower.

The UBW32 is also a very good stand-alone development platform for the USB PIC32 chip. It contains a simple to use USB bootloader so that you can write your own code and download it to the board without any additional programmer, tools, or software. If you need low-level debugging, you can also attach an ICD2/ICD3 or other PIC debugger.

The PIC32 chip is capable of doing USB OTG, USB Mass Store, USB Virtual Com Port and USB Host roles. There is a footprint on the bottom of the board for a USB connector that will allow you to plug any USB device into the UBW32. There is a jumper that allows you to power the VBUS 5V USB wire if you program your UBW32 to be a USB Host.

Note: Any UBW32s bought before 11/3/2009 has the first version of the bootloader on it. This version of the bootloader causes the "BL" (bootload) command to break with the latest version of the firmware (v1.3). In order to update to the most recent version of the firmware, which fixes the problem, you'll need a hardware programmer.

Features:

PIC32MX460F512L
32KBytes of RAM
512KBytes of Flash
78 usable I/O pins
CPU runs at 80MHz
USB Bootloader

Documents:

Pricing

	out of stock

$39.95	price
$35.96	10-99 (10% off)
$31.96	100+ (20% off)

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Comments

34 comments

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	by Jordii +7.5 \| December 3, 2008 at 1:03 PM +0.27
Yes I'm very frustrated. I will try it..

	by Jordii +7.5 \| December 3, 2008 at 1:17 PM +0.27
Jordii: Yes i feel very frustrated. I maybe will try it..

copperclad

+2.8

| December 8, 2008 at 11:47 AM

my UBW-32 came today , and is a great little board

plug it in , point windows to the driver , download from http://www.schmalzhaus.com/UBW32/
and it installed itself on com port 5 , i use tera term pro ( free terminal program ) and it only supports com's 1 ~ 4 , so i went into device manager and switched com 5 to com 2 and after typing V into the terminal program , i was greated with "UBW32 Version 1.0" , very cool little board , thanks Sparkfun

	by jproach +1 \| December 8, 2008 at 12:34 AM 0
To allow use of COM5+ in teraterm: go to teraterms install directory, open Teraterm.ini, and edit the line MaxComPort to a higher number.

	by brennen \| December 8, 2008 at 1:04 PM
It might also be worth giving PuTTY a shot, since Tera Term hasn't been actively developed in almost a decade. Docs here. I also just noticed this fork of the original Tera Term, which might be worth looking at.

	by ak6dn +2.6 \| January 2, 2009 at 1:02 AM 0
Actually not true. TeraTerm development has been restarted. See http://logmett.com/index.php?/Products/Tera-Term.html The new version (4.6.1) is now greatly improved over the older versions.

	by copperclad +2.8 \| December 9, 2008 at 6:39 AM 0
hi thanks jproach & brennen , and thanks for the link to PuTTY , i see there is more info and help on the forum here , looks like i have some reading to do ;-) , thanks again

	by HungryMaggot +1.3 \| March 9, 2009 at 6:12 AM 0
I want to use it in a car with XBee modem and other things like sensors, and stuff. Can I use this board as standalone (without a PC connected to USB)?. To use it standalone: should I have to delete bootloader and then load my HEX program through ICSP (ICD2) like any other standalone MCU ??

EmbeddedMan

+5.4

| April 2, 2009 at 11:53 AM

Yes, absolutely you can. You write some code, download it using the USB bootloader, then unplug from the PC (and obviously supply power to the UBW32) and your application will run. You can write that application code to do anything you want. There's no need to remove the bootloader - it will simply pass control to your application on bootup.

I have several UBW32 in permanent installations that work exactly this way. (If you're ever here http://www.discoveryworld.org/ check out the bubble raster array exhibit.)

*Brian

pranjalchaubey

+1.4

| March 26, 2009 at 9:09 AM

There's one big power supply blunder in the Eagle Schematic file posted for USB Bit whacker.

In both 5V and 3.3V voltage regulators (LM317), the resistor from the 'OUT' pin is connected in series with the resistor on the 'ADJ' pin which is WRONG. The resistor from the 'OUT' pin should be connected directly to the 'ADJ' pin. In the 5V case, the IC is outputting 1.2V.

Kindly modify the Eagle schematic before someone damages his own circuit in trying to copy from the schematic.

	by EmbeddedMan +5.4 \| April 2, 2009 at 11:58 AM 0
Ahh, now I see what you mean. There are two different schematics - one on my site and one on SparkFun's. Mine is wrong. It uses LM317s, but has the resistors connected incorrectly. Luckily, none of those boards ever got built - the schematic on Spark's site is the one used for the production boards. *Brian

EmbeddedMan

+5.4

| April 2, 2009 at 11:48 AM

Actually, this is simply a confusion - the UBW32 on my UBW32 website (schmalzhaus.com/UBW32) has a BOM and schematic that use LM317s. However, when SparkFun decided to take my design and build them to sell, they changed to FAN1117As. See their datasheet here : http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Components/FAN1117A.pdf

You'll see that they did the right thing in the schematic and followed the datasheet for the part.

This is one of the dangers of not putting real part numbers in the schematic PDF.

Rest assured, the UBW32 works just fine - the 5V rail generates very nice clean 5V with the regulators as built.

I will try to get future versions of the schematic cleaned up and have part numbers added so that the two designs can be in sync once again.

Sorry for the confusion-
*Brian

VanG

| June 20, 2009 at 11:03 AM

I would like to use the UBW32 as a replacement for using my parallel port for I/O from my computer. What is the fastest speed at which one of the I/O pins can have a single bit of data output to it, and what is the fastest speed at which one of the I/O pins can have a single bit of data read from it? Also, what is the latency in reading/outputting a single bit from/to a pin?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

EmbeddedMan

+5.4

| September 14, 2009 at 9:39 AM

The UBW32 can toggle an I/O pin at 40MHz, and it can read an I/O pin at 40MHz. You can achieve those speeds with custom firmware. The stock firmware for the UBW32 is not able to read or write anywhere near that fast, although I have not measured it. I will do so, as that is an important metric. Note that none of the code so far has been optimized with this in mind - it is really meant to be more of an example firmware that you can then take and build your own functions into.

As far as how fast things can be transferred to/from the PC, it should be possible (with the right firmware) to get close to 400KBytes/s or higher, but again I need to measure that and post it.

	by EmbeddedMan +5.4 \| September 15, 2009 at 7:48 AM 0
I've done a little bit of testing (see http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=17247 for more information and code) and it looks like you can get 12,000 'commands' (setting a bit high or low) out to the UBW32 per second. So that gives around 100uS/bit toggle.

	by wizhippo +1 \| June 26, 2009 at 7:07 AM 0
I think I may try this instead of the LPC. What devel tools are there? I see Microchip has a c compiler but it looks like it wouldbe handicapped unless you pay for it. Any suggestions for a free devel env for these?

EmbeddedMan

+5.4

| September 14, 2009 at 9:42 AM

The development tools I used for the UBW32 project are MPLAB and C32, both from Microchip. I used the free version of C32 (MPLAB is always free) and it works just great. There are some small optimizations that you don't get with the $$$ version, but it makes no difference because we have tons of Flash and RAM on this beast. I strongly suggest you try the free C32 version - I've never used anything else because I've never felt held back by C32 in any way.

Having said that, StickOS is far easier to start with (especially if you don't know C) and is a cool way to write code for the UBW32.

	by JMR +1 \| July 30, 2009 at 11:18 AM 0
Would it be straight forward to interface this unit to an encoder and LCD to totalize the count during each timebase cycle, convert the rate to engineering units, and to display on the LCD?

	by EmbeddedMan +5.4 \| September 14, 2009 at 9:44 AM 0
Yes, if you are familiar with C, you'll have no problem doing this. The UBW32 has SPI, I2C and parallel ports, so you can easily talk to the LCD if it uses one of those interfaces. Reading an encoder is very easy too. You could start with the UBW32 firmware, or write your own from scratch.

	by MechCD +1.2 \| September 13, 2009 at 6:06 AM 0
StickOS is a lot easier to use than Mircochip's C if you're just getting your feet wet or want to do a little more than the built in firmware

jamis

+3.4

| October 20, 2009 at 1:49 PM

I pulled this thing out of the SparkFun box and I'm already impressed. It's a solid board with solid drivers and solid uploading software.

A few suggestions to SFE though:

1. Make the screen print color White! The black is hard to read...

2. Put a link in the Description to where we can get the HID uploader software! It was a bit of a search to find it...

3. Get some tutorials up for this thing! I'll try to post a few after I get my head around it a bit more...

4. Most importantly, start selling the cardboard shipping boxes you use! Those little red boxes are great temporary project boxes!

Thanks for yet another great board otherwise though!

EmbeddedMan

+5.4

| October 21, 2009 at 8:47 AM

I agree with everything you said. (Especially the red shipping boxes - I keep ALL of mine and use them to store all of my little goodies.)

I will change the silk to white in the next version. I will put up a link to the HID bootloader application. I would LOVE it if you could put up some good tutorials. (I haven't had the time.) The next version will also have pads for a 32KHz crystal, and improved routing on the back side of the board (by removing the spots for pull-up resistors, that I don't think ANYONE is using.)

	by hubsi +1 \| December 28, 2009 at 4:44 AM 0
When will you deliver this new version ?

	by jamis +3.4 \| October 22, 2009 at 3:36 PM 0
Another note about these: The LED's and switches are on Port E not Port F. This isn't noticable on the schematic linked here unless you zoom in a lot. I wasted a fair amount of time on this so I figured it'd be worth it to point out. I'm working on a "Hello World" blinking led example for the Hi-Tech Picc compiler now...

	by jamis +3.4 \| October 22, 2009 at 7:43 PM 0
I just posted an LED Blinking program for this board written for the Hi-Tech PICC32 compiler over in the forums: http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=17769&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight= I hope this helps some people get started with their own-brew code! (sorry, it doesn't use the HID uploader yet so you'll need some other way to program the board...)

Crazed Potatoe

+1.2

| December 12, 2009 at 9:27 PM

I just bought this circuit (Have not received the circuit yet), and I'm wondering if the output pins supplies with (+) or (-), and if i have to insert (+) or (-) into the the input pins. If I'm correct, the output pins supplies with (+) and the input pins (-)? I tried to figure this out by reading the datasheet file with no luck :(. I need to know this, so i know wether i should place a transistor on the IR receiver or not :]

Thanks for any relpies :D

tlied2

+6.2

| December 15, 2009 at 2:16 AM

If I follow your question correctly, the answer is that it is configurable in software. When you setup the pin in your software you select if an output pin is configured for open drain (active low - sinks current to gnd) or not. Inputs would be high impedance and offer a software-selectable pull-up resistor. I think most microcontrollers offer similar features these days. I expect you can connect your IR receiver directly, but YMMV depending on what you have and are trying to do.

	by Crazed Potatoe +1.2 \| December 18, 2009 at 5:50 AM 0
Ok, thank you very much :D

	by Crazed Potatoe +1.2 \| December 25, 2009 at 8:12 AM 0
I just uploaded the Hello World project (http://www.schmalzhaus.com/UBW32/FW/HelloWorld/) via the HIDBootloader, now i cant fin the device when i connect it to my computer (USB). How do i reset it? :(

	by Crazed Potatoe +1.2 \| December 25, 2009 at 9:35 AM 0
Forgot to put this in my comment, but the hardware manager is saying: "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" in the "Device Status" box.

	by Crazed Potatoe +1.2 \| December 25, 2009 at 10:33 AM 0
Sorry, my wrong. Figured out that ive bricked the circuit. I orderet the PICkit™ 2 Starter Kit from Microchip, hope this will solve the problem since i can hardware program is now :]

	by Evgeny +1.4 \| December 28, 2009 at 6:41 AM 0
If someone succeded downloading Eagle files? All my attempts to download UBW32_v24.zip file resulted "It does not appear to be a valid archive" message.

	by Crazed Potatoe +1.2 \| December 28, 2009 at 7:20 AM 0
Weird, i can unzip the files fine. Try to use WinRAR when unzipping the files ( http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar391.exe ), if you already are using WinRAR then update it. To extract the file after installing WinRAR, simply rightclick the file and choose "Exctract Files Here". Hope this helps ;)

	by matkey +2.2 \| January 30, 2010 at 11:06 AM 0
Im going to be getting one of these, but I need to reduce the PIC's voltage down to 2v6 to allow it to talk directly to a Telit UC864 3G GSM module. Is this change just a simple recalculation of the resistor pair on the 3v3 regulator?