[chbot] Digilent ChipKit Uno32

[Michael Pearce]

Correction to the following:


>
> * It's from Microchip. The licensing is dubious, with plenty of the
> Arduino/gcc material they supply being peppered with "you may run this
> only on Microchip hardware". Well I'm not interested in vendor lock-ins
> and non-portability.
>

It was NOT designed by Microchip and is NOT a Microchip product!
But Microchip (and many others) do sell it.

ChipKIT was 100% designed by Digilent which it's only association with
Microchip is that they are a design partner.
The only thing is that the ChipKIT trademark is owned by Microchip.
The porting of "wired" and the GUI was completely an outside effort,
done by one of the hacker spaces.

Microchip did help them out a little, and staff from Microchips
compiler team did help port GCC and get the C++ side of things running
but it is a fully open source product.
Arduino did try to sue Digilent for not using an Atmel on the board,
but lost because of their early documentation in the Arduino effort
that Arduino is not processor specific.... ended up as a TM dispute
which Diligent fixed by adding a TM in the appropriate places in
their documentation.

I do know thins because I was part of an internal effort at Microchip
to create something similar... then we were told to stop and let
Digilent do it.

Code size issue is mostly because of C++ bloat... and 32bit wide
instructions at the moment... but will reduce if people put more
effort into the compiler, and even use the MIPS16 option for the
assembler.
It does run lightning fast in comparison to an 8 bit ARM though..

And don't blame Microchip for the lack of library ports or the SPI
thing.... thats completely up to the Hacker space and anyone else to
wants to work on it.... its open source after all.
A lot of those libraries out there are very Atmel specific which will
take some effort to port.

Mike