MPIDE

Introduction and purpose of the IDE

MPIDE (Multi-Platform Integrated Development Environment) is an Arduino-like project of chipKIT™, which allows you to reprogram the board with different custom sketches. The IDE can be downloaded from the official site of chipKIT™.
It is used to reflash the program memory of the microcontroller without an external programmer after a bootloader (check Software tab) is uploaded.

IDE features

As a difference of the other similar IDEs (like Arduino, Maple, Pinguino etc.) this one gives you the opportunity to work with different kind of microcontrollers. You don't have to change the IDE, in case you need to work with another family of microprocessor.
MPIDE inherits all the core functions from Arduino IDE. In addition to these it has some specific libraries.

Without any modifications MPIDE 0.023 provides the following libraries:
- EEPROM
- Ethernet
- Firmata
- LiquidCrystal
- Matrix
- MAX6675
- OneWire
- SD card
- Servo
- SoftPWMServo
- Software Serial
- SPI
- Sprite
- Stepper
- Wire (I2C)

and for chipKit there are few additional libraries:
- DSPI
- SoftSPI

Detailed information about all of them can be found on the page chipKIT™ Libraries

For all those libraries chipKit™ also provides an examples to demonstrate functionality of all of them. In addition to all these they have also simple examples like blinking LED, push button, serial communication etc.

Inside the IDE there is an embedded Serial Monitor which allows you easily to communicate with the host computer via virtual USB COM port. This is possible only when the board is not in programming (bootloader) state. So with this feature you don't need an external terminal program like PuTTY, Siow, HyperTerminal, TeraTerm etc. in order to transfer data between the host and the device.

Software

In order to adapt bootloader for your custom board, chipKIT™ are providing source code of their projects on GitHUB: chipKIT™ bootloaders Uploading of the bootloader requires external programmer (for example PicKit3).

For this moment Olimex provides support for 6 of our boards:<br\> PIC32-Pinguino<br\> PIC32-Pinguino-OTG<br\> PIC32-Pinguino-Micro<br\> PIC32-T795H<br\> DUINOMITE-MEGA<br\> DUINOMITE-eMEGA<br\>