Does this sound familiar to you? After spending many hours on optimizing for speed and memory your super-duper MCU application, you can only conclude that it will not run on an Arduino board. You have built the shield (the Arduino compatible extension board) with your special I/O and you wrote most of the software, but these last functions that should add that finishing touch just don’t fit in the board’s memory. Maybe Rascal can help?

 

Built around a 400 MHz AT91SAM9G20 ARM9 from Atmel, the Rascal is an open source Linux board compatible with Arduino extension cards or shields. Programming the board is easy thanks to a library written in Python from Pytronics that allows easy access to peripherals and shields. The Rascal’s firmware comes with a web server that can serve as a programming interface; you can write your applications directly in a web browser connected to the Rascal board.