Ten Tec 506 and Arduino

[wb4jfi at knology.net]

Mike, where did you see the price?  I looked on the Ten-Tec web site last 
night, and could not find it.  After a Google search, I found one mention of 
$199.  That's not too far out of line for a production radio from a real 
company, although this rig is quite limited out of the box.  Compared to a 
Softrock, the Rebel could be of interest to beginners, for example.  I'm 
kind of surprised that Ten-Tec was the company to come up with this.  They 
have been dinged in the past for not providing software/code and other info 
for some of their other radios.

The 506 uses a chipKIT version of the Uno, which is made by Digilent, the 
same vendor that makes the Nexys2 FPGA boards some of us have played with. 
The chipKITt boards are not 100% Arduino compatible, but are very nice. 
They have more resources than their Arduino counterparts, and run faster 
(80MHz vs 16MHz).  There is more memory, more I/O, etc.  They use 32-bit 
Microchip PIC processors rather than Atmel processors.  The pricing is very 
similar to Arduinos.

There are two chipKIT boards, the Uno32 (like an Arduino Uno)($27), and the 
Max32($50), like an Arduino Mega2560.

They claim to be mostly compatible with Arduinos.  This is based on both the 
hardware I/O almost matching the Arduino footprint (allowing many but not 
all shields to work) and mostly software compatible AT THE IDE LEVEL.  A lot 
of work has gone into bending the Arduino IDE to create PIC-able code 
instead of Atmel (or a mid-level interpreter?).  You can also program them 
using the Microchip PIC32 development environments if you prefer that.

These chipKIT boards might be of interest to those AMRADers that are finding 
the Uno too tight to complete projects with (hint hint).  There are some 
incompatabilites with the Arduino line, both in hardware and software.
73, Terry, WB4JFI


-----Original Message----- 
From: Mike O'Dell
Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2013 11:27 AM
To: 'Tacos'
Cc: wb4jfi at knology.net ; Gerald Wolczanski
Subject: Re: Ten Tec 506 and Arduino

The design is very clean and nice,
but the price has too many digits in it
unless there's some compelling info
not apparent in that admittedly cursory
blurb.

     -mo

On 5/17/13 7:05 PM, wb4jfi at knology.net wrote:
> Thanks Gerald.  This looks rather interesting, depending on price.
> Terry, WB4JFI
>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Gerald Wolczanski Sent: Friday, May 17, 
> 2013 4:44 PM To: 'Tacos' Subject: Ten Tec 506 and Arduino
> http://qrper.com/
>
>
>
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