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Amicus18 review

Former Member

This is reposted from the original road test page...

 

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Mine arrived yesterday. I haven't had  chance to do anything with it beyond unpacking it yet. I am hoping to  have a play over the weekend.

First impression is  the packaging at least is very 'hobbyist'. An inkjet printed cover sheet  wrapped around the board is all the documentation there was. The boards  themselves do look good quality though. There was an Amicus18 itself, a  prototyping companion shield and a set of stackable pin headers for  soldering to the shield. The shield is standard breadboard layout  designed for placing DIP devices along the center.

One  thing I hadn't realised before was that although there are three LEDs  on the board, none are under user control. One is power supply presence  and the other two are send/receive activity from the USB to serial  converter. Given that the two example programs in the hardware manual  are about blinking/PWMing LEDs, it would have been nice to have at least  one available on an I/O port out of the box.

Personally,  I would have loved to have seen a bank of LEDs on the board so that the  state of at least one full port can be immediately seen. This is meant  to be a prototyping/development board and I've found that a stack of  LEDs can be of one the most useful debugging tools available. Plus  flashing lights look cool image.

 

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I tried to  have a play on Sunday. The software installed fine (although the Amicus  website is a little confusing as some bits talk about an IDE, some  about a compiler but it doesn't make it clear that the two are actually  the same thing).

 

I'm  not a great fan of 'thow shalt use our IDE' type products. And this one  really didn't get off to a good start with its colour scheme. I use a  none standard colour scheme (basically white text on a dark background  as I find it is much, much easier on the eyes than the Windows default  white background). Unfortunately, this means I can't read any of the  menus or toolbar text in the IDE because they use my Windows custom text  colour but the IDE's own choice of background colour - white on nearly  white. Also, the syntax highlighting has a limited range of colours  available (there is no custom RGB values option) and doesn't even allow  white let alone something unusual like orange.

 

I  haven't tried writing much code yet so I can't comment too much on how  good an editor the IDE is. Although it definitely has peculiarities  compared to my preferred editor. Not sure I would call it better or  worse than MPLAB's IDE yet. Need to try using it in anger first...

 

Moving  on to the compiler, again there are lots of peculiarities compared to  other languages I use. The last time I used BASIC was a BBC micro, but  even over and above the language itself, it gives the impression someone  deliberately set out to make the syntax as non C-like as possible!

 

More  curiously, it is also very tailored to specific hardware. That is, the  language itself has built in keywords for moving the cursor, drawing  pixels, etc. on two particular LCD controllers (one Samsung, one  Toshiba). There are also slightly more generic commands for using things  like RC5 and Sony remote control protocols. Plus PIC specific commands  for configuring PWM ports and such like. All of which should be very  useful and time saving (as long as you are using the appropriate  hardware).

 

The  real surprise was when I actually tried to plug the board in and try  out some of this funky compiler stuff. It was only then that I realised  the board has a USB host port not a device port. This means you need a  very unusual host to host cable. It seems there was one of these shipped with the board as part of the road test kit. Not sure if you get it as standard if you buy the Amicus18 retail. Alas, I put mine in the drawer when the kit arrived and completely forgot about it by the time I came to play with the board at the weekend! I will post more once I have reunited the cable with the board...

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  • I received my road test kit last week. I have a backlog of work to clear before I can dedicate some time to my review, but I wanted to add a few comments here.

     

    I too was a little surprised by the product packaging, but I understand this is a very new product line, so I imagine they will improve it. I am looking forward to firing it up.

     

    A client of mine introduced me to their Proton IDE some years ago, requesting I use it. The only thing basic about Basic is the name. A good language for midrange PIC's in my experience, maybe a good topic for another thread someday.

  • in reply to Former Member

    I received mine yesterday and was underwhelmed by the packaging and lack of documentation. A printed sheet that directs you to the website on each device is all there is, I would have thought that having taken so much time to produce such a good looking product, they would have included a small brochure with the essentials to get you started.  I proceeded to do what came naturally and plugged the device in as the hardware manual stated it is a common serial port driver that was required, I should have read a bit further! You need to download the 2 lots of software to obtain the driver (about 160Mb of downloads). I am still trying to get the smaller of the 2 files after several failed attempts, the website appears to provide a fairly slow download speed to the point of dropping off (I am in New Zealand so I do expect a small decrease in performance for a website in the UK).

     

    Perhaps even up the price for a few dollars and include a 256Mb USB memory stick with the software preloaded to get you going even quicker could be a good idea.

     

    I will download it with the free download manager they have a link to on the website (perhaps they know something!).

     

    I have Vista Ultimate 32 bit O/S installed and it seems that it behaves as per John Harrisons post earlier and only gives the option to go to the windows update site for drivers. The dcoumentation appears to have been written for Windows XP.

     

    Hopefully tonight I will be able to connect to the device and start to have a play with some code ... will keep you posted.

  • in reply to WarrenW

    I think it's a bit unfair to complain about the underwhelming packaging. Well, because I'm comparing it with the package that an arduino arrives in. Foam and antistatic bag - just like the amicus.

    It does the job - protecting the board with minimal waste. And after all, it's just going to be thrown out straight away anyway.

     

    A paper manual would be handy, but there again... no different from arduino.

     

    Now the two drivers being installed separately, that is a bit awkward. A good installer that handles this would be nice.

    I don't know if the download software warrants the extra expense of a USB stick? A CD / mini-CD maybe?

    (On Vista Ultimate 32bit, I had no problem installing drivers after Windows had "faffed" around [see above] - and they downloaded fine)

     

    Okay, I'm getting sidetracked (and I need to save some rants/complaints/praises for my review). Perhaps the packaging (colour coding) could be a little less retro(homebrew), but I don't have a problem with minimal packaging.

     

    Rob

  • in reply to Former Member

    I wasn't really complaining that the packaging is minimal. It is more that I was surprised to see the cover sheet being printed on an inkjet rather than professionally produced. It just makes the whole package look like it was knocked up in someone's bedroom in a spare afternoon. Whereas, the board itself and the IDE/compiler do seem like pretty good quality products.

     

    Re the two drivers. Not too sure why there are two. It looks like the first is a USB hub and the second is the actual serial port. Not sure where the hub is coming from, I thought the USB connector went directly to the FT232 which I'm sure is a straight USB serial port.

  • in reply to Former Member

    I too agree with John, when they produce such a good product, why skimp on the packaging, it WOULD look impressive with a proper commercially produced wrapper rather than the low cost plain paper version. In saying that I am impressed with the IDE software, lots of code samples covering a very wide array of potential uses of the Amicus unit. Given that most of the Arduino sheilds will work with the Amicus I would say they have struck a winner for those that prefer to use Microchip rather than Atmel.

     

    I had no problems with the download last night so perhaps the issue was with my ISP.

     

    Given the size of the downloads I would still suggest that (especially for those without broadband) a USB stick with the IDE software on it may be a good idea. This weekend I intend to have a trial on some of the sample code to see how easy it is to get the unit doing some real work, then I will attempt to write a small program of my own to get my head around this powerful little beastie.

     

    I am looking forward to seeing if I can 'port' my current picaxe applications to this much more flexible chip. I will be working on a V8 supercar simulator soon and this will be perfect for the job.

     

    Cheers 

  • in reply to WarrenW

    Very quick follow up note on the board quality. One thing I did notice was that the PCB tracks on the companion shield are very thin. In the normal run of things, this would not be an issue. They are certainly not intended for carrying large amounts power so there is no need to to have massively wide tracks. However, for a prototyping board, narrow tracks can be a little too fragile as I recently discovered.

     

    Basically, I tried recycling my companion shield the other day. That is, removing the couple of LEDs I'd stuck down for initial testing and building something more interesting. Now, I'm not a professional when it comes to reworking PCBs by any means but I have done a fair bit of stuff with veroboard over the years so I'm not all that ham fisted with a soldering iron. Having said that, I somehow managed to break one of the tracks on the board. I don't know if I slurped it off with the solder sucker or just snapped it with the iron tip. Either way, I had to bridge the break with a wire link to use that row again.

     

    So yes, the boards are good quality in terms of design and manufacture. Beware that the companion shield is not designed for frequent re-use on different projects. You can strip it and rebuild with a new circuit if you are careful, but you are probably better off just buying another shield and starting from clean.

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  • in reply to WarrenW

    Very quick follow up note on the board quality. One thing I did notice was that the PCB tracks on the companion shield are very thin. In the normal run of things, this would not be an issue. They are certainly not intended for carrying large amounts power so there is no need to to have massively wide tracks. However, for a prototyping board, narrow tracks can be a little too fragile as I recently discovered.

     

    Basically, I tried recycling my companion shield the other day. That is, removing the couple of LEDs I'd stuck down for initial testing and building something more interesting. Now, I'm not a professional when it comes to reworking PCBs by any means but I have done a fair bit of stuff with veroboard over the years so I'm not all that ham fisted with a soldering iron. Having said that, I somehow managed to break one of the tracks on the board. I don't know if I slurped it off with the solder sucker or just snapped it with the iron tip. Either way, I had to bridge the break with a wire link to use that row again.

     

    So yes, the boards are good quality in terms of design and manufacture. Beware that the companion shield is not designed for frequent re-use on different projects. You can strip it and rebuild with a new circuit if you are careful, but you are probably better off just buying another shield and starting from clean.

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