Have you ever wanted to test something out very quickly, but dread pulling out the breadboard and wires? If you've ever needed a QuickIO Shield, it's here! Majenko Technologies---creator of UECIDE and the chipKIT Lenny---has released this new shield.

This incredibly useful accessory snaps right onto your Arduino or chipKIT board, instantly giving you all the handy IO you need, as the name says, quickly. With four pushbuttons, two 10KΩ potentiometers, and

The chipKIT uC32 has been around a while, but Fábio Souza at Embarcados has just published a brand new Overview which is worth a look. The article is written in Portuguese; you should be able to use the "Translate" option in your browser to get the English version if needed.

Fábio's article borrows some diagrams from Digilent's excellent Resource Center, and also explains how to load chipKIT-core into the [Arduino Boards

The chipKIT development team is happy to announce the chipKIT-core releases: v1.3.0 and v1.3.1, the former being the main release, with the latter simply updating the compiler from v1.40 to v1.42.

These two new releases don't necessarily add any enormous new features, but they do have several nice bug fixes and some good improvements in the functionality available to a sketch. One noteworthy fix in v1.3.0 is the update to the bootloader host application "pic32prog" to support MikroElektronika's [Clicker 2 for

Overview:

Did you know that you can program your chipKIT board or any PIC32 chip preprogrammed with a chipKIT Bootloader right from MPLAB X? It's actually quite easy to do. This tutorial will demonstrate how to obtain the proper binaries and how to set up MPLAB X to download programs written in C or MIPS Assembly to a PIC32 using the AVRdude bootloader. Note that this tutorial including screen captures was done using a Windows® 7 PC.

What you will need:

To complete this task, you will require the following:

• The latest version of MPLAB X IDE available as a FREE download

We have some great news for USB lovers! A new board, chipKIT Lenny, is in final prototype stages and preparing for production. If you haven't already guessed, the chipKIT Lenny is the PIC32 equivalent of the Arduino Leonardo, only considerably advanced, with more peripherals and overall power.

The Lenny features a direct USB connection that provides a separate USB serial connection in addition to the two UART serial connections provided on the GPIO headers. Advanced users can use the Microchip Harmony framework in [MPLAB X