I hate to say it but I am regretting the choice to switch to the chipKIT based hardware. UNLIKE what everything says, Arduino does not run on it. Oh, my blink.ino example did. But nothing which actually matters does. Their fans and forums say to use DSPI lib for SPI, however, I couldn't get it to work at all. But the standard SPI I was able to get going.
Now, I'm trying to get the uC32 to talk to the Sparkfun Real Time clock via I2C. It is being more difficult than SPI!!!! What the hell?!? That RTC was the easiest thing I have ever done in Arduino! It was faster to get working than getting out a breadboard and wiring up an LED! Seriously! When I set it up on the Seeed Mega, I turned on the soldering iron, put a 4 pin header on the Mega's I2C pins. Then cut a 4 wire CD audio cable, plugged it onto the header so the Vcc pin was the red wire. Then soldered on the wires accordingly to the RTC. Cut n paste code. BAM! Done!!! Bob's your uncle.
Here's my post asking for help in chipKIT land. On that thread are fancy pics of the RTC module and my new shiny NKC Electronics Arduino proto shield. Rather than take apart the actually working hardware in the Arduino stack already built in this thread, I bought a new proto shield and easy stepper driver. I'm pretty good with the soldering iron and hot air station, but I thought it best not to take apart what was already actually working before I had this up and running. Good choice!
BTW, I bought this NKC proto shield because not only does it have the buses and linked rows of holes (a la breadboard), it has an area of I2C in the bottom corner. I'm using the row most inboard for the right angle 4 pin connector for the RTC module and then the next two rows, I have pull-up resistors on clock and data.
Sorry for sounding like I'm whinging or something, but come on, I was really expecting something a little better. I'm now contemplating hand coding I2C protocol on pins 4 and 5 thinking that might be faster than trying to convince their "libraries" to actually work. 
Statistics: Posted by unexpectedly — Wed Aug 28, 2013 9:11 pm