I recently received my Amicus18, and I was very excited to get started playing with it. Like most of the other
reviewers I was a little dismayed by the packaging and I was concerned that the boards might be of low quality.
However I was not going to pass judgement just yet.After all we're engineers, we care about performance not so much the pretty fluff. Once I pulled the boards out I was very pleasantly suprised by the quality of the boards, excellent construction, no cold solder joints, clean silkscreen, sweeeet. The Amicus looks just like the Arduino, enough said. The companion shield is well made and comes with the headers unassembled, so you'll have to pull out your soldering iron.
I went to the site (www.myamicus.co.uk) and downloaded the IDE. I had a little bit of difficulty figuring out why the board wasn't communicating with the IDE. I decided to look through the help documentation and thankfully the hardware manual included the procedure for installing the drivers, which since I have WinXP went without a hitch. It seems the documentation is written assuming WinXP, if you use any of the other Windows operating systems these instructions should give enough information to be able to get the board working with the IDE.
The IDE is very lightweight(which I prefer), it second possibly only to the Arduino IDE itself. Lightweight warrants some definition, in my world a lightweight IDE is clean and uncluttered, I figured it out within 20 minutes of using it. The IDE doesn't have a debugger, which is a little bit of a bummer but not that big of an issue in my book. It has a built-in serial terminal, ASCII Table(handy reference), and a link to Windows Calculator(Why??). The IDE has a plugin manager which a power user could probably configure to call useful programs from within the IDE.
Programming was very straightforward, you write your basic program, hook-up the Amicus18 and hit the compile and program button. I tried one of the demo programs and it worked great(Hello World LED). I played with the serial terminal and that also worked flawlessly, overall I was very happy with IDE.
Now how does the Amicus18 compare to the Arduino? I think such a comparison is unfair. What makes the Arduino great? Not Atmel, not the Arduino IDE, it's the vibrant community and code base that supports the Arduino. The Amicus18 is based on the Arduino form factor, that's pretty much it. The Amicus is designed to help sell the Proton BASIC compiler using the ubiquity of the Arduino, and in that role it shines.
If you're a BASIC programmer who doesn't feel comfortable(or doesn't want to learn C) then I can't think of a better way to get in on some microcontroller action.Like the Arduino, the proton compiler has lots of built-in functions for controlling the main peripherals. This helps to speed up programming at the cost of pin-point control. For most users this isn't a bad trade-off. I'm not a BASIC programmer, I'm more of an incompetent C programmer so I probably won't be using the Amicus IDE. I intend to use the board for my projects, I'll be programming it using MPLAB and the C18 compiler with my PICkit2. I can do this because the Amicus18 board comes with a six pin header for ICSP(awesome IDE).
To Recap
Pros
- If you're a BASIC programmer who wants to get into microcontrollers, this is for you
- Arduino form factor(shields are compatible)
- Lightweight easy to use IDE
- Well documented(Included BASIC reference is 300+ pages)
- Predefined functions to control the main peripherals.
Cons
- The IDE lacks advanced features such as debugging and variable watch windows
- Not the Arduino, not compatible with the Arduino libraries.
I have included a few pictures of the boards and infamous cheap packiging as well as a screenshot of the IDE.
I hope this review is helpful.
Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia
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