HelvePic32 - a board for everyone to solder
HelvePic32 Story
The HelvePic32 was created as a microcontroller board that everyone can solder. No SMD parts or pre-soldered components to give one the experience in creating something all by yourself. So the target audience are beginners and young people who want to be in control of a computer and not its user (or slave)
Grove Modules
A board alone does not serve much without extensions. In the Arduino world these are shields that do not fit on to the HelvePic32. Instead of creating the wheel again we decided to support the Grove modules of seedstudio. This give you the chance to use them with your arduino as well.
Wings and Shields
Wings and Shields clip on to the HelvePic. The prominent wings are the LED Wing, the Grove wing and the GVS wing.More wings are underway including WiFi and TFT
HelvePic32 BreadBoard Sidekick
When working with breadboard versions of boards, I do not like that the centered board often leav just one or two pins to connect peripherals. I therefore decided to create a board that clips to the side of a breadboard, giving me two pinrows per board pin plus power and ground.
The result is the BreadBoard Sidekick, or short BBside.
A detailed description can be found in the menu.
There is also a BBside version with a ESP module as coprocessor. (to come)
In addition to the HevePic32, we have released a new SMD version of the board. It has the same footprint as the HelvePic32 but uses a more powerful version of the chip:
- 256 kB Flash memory
- 64 kB RAM
- 29 GPIO pins
- ESP8266 socket (esp-01 module)
The board offers the additional pins in a center pin-block together with GND, 5V and 3.3V in a 2x8 pin row.
The 8 lower pins are acompanied by a row of 3.3V pins and GND offering a direct plug-in of servos or sensors with GVS-cables.
There is a new version of the HelvePic32:
It is identical to the HelvePic32 but uses a SMD version of the chip. It plug right into the standard breadboards and is powered by the USB cable.
The HelvePic32 has the size 42x72 mm, which is a standard module size.
All parts are through hole as demonstrated in this 3D simulation. It can be soldered within an hour by an inexperienced new-comer to electronics.
The board is programmed using MPIDE, similar to the Arduino IDE and the Arduino code can be used in 99% of the cases.