Introduction
The following guide is here to hopefully assist you in getting started with Jaluino board. Jaluino is made of two major ingredients:
- hardware : Jaluino is an electronic board, an Arduino-like board, based on Microchip PIC 18F4550, on which you can plug several daughter board named "shields"
- software: Jaluino is also an IDE (Integrated Developement Environment), uses jalv2 high level language, jallib libraries and provides sample programs
This Getting Started document is about how to setup both these parts to get a fully functionnal platform, ready to have fun with.
Because Jaluino is opened, you'll sometime have to make choices. You'll find enough information to make appropriate decisions, according to what you need, what you have, what you can and "mood-of-the-day".
Prerequisites
Before sweetly diving into Jaluino, you first have to:
- find a Jaluino board: either you'll have to build it from scratch, or you can also order a PCB. Please go to Jaluino shop for more. You don't necessarily need any shield, but having at least a Crumboard shield with a breadboard can help, as it is specifically designed to help you follow some tutorials and prototype simple designs.
- have access to a PIC programmer: in the process of getting started, we'll soon choose and program onboard PIC 18F4550 microcontroller, with a bootloader. In order to do this, you'll need a PIC programmer, at least once. You have plenty programmers out there, like PICKit 2, Wisp648, etc... You can even build your own for free.
- get few parts: a LED and a resistor (1K for instance). This will be the climax of this guide, the ultimate goal to reach, that is, "Blink A LED" !
- power on a computer: either a PC under Windows, Mac OSX or Linux. Depending on selected bootloader, a RS-232 serial port will be needed. Either find a PC with a DB-9 serial connector, or use a USB-to-serial converter.
Once you're ready, take a deep breath.
Let's go...
