Arduino platform is really popular today. Probably because it is very simple, easy mastered by novice and has strong and growing community around the world. Only limitation of Arduino is that platform is tied to AVR family microcontrollers. Other shortcoming might be non native USB interface on the chip.

The guys from hackinglab managed to build somewhat similar to arduino but with different microcontroller base and IDE. Opensource of course!

The main difference is that Pingduino uses PIC 18F2550 microcontroller which has integrated USB interface. Pingduino IDE is built on Python which translates program into C code – which is actually shorter in legth and execution speed.

Pingduino application uses SDCC C compiler, GPUTLS assembler and linker and bootloader based on PUF VASCO project. IDE is available for windows, linux and Mac os x. Lets hope that project will evolve in to stable and supported evironment for PIC lovers. Native USB feature may be kick ass for Arduino itself don’t you think? Check out for latest news in http://jpmandon.blogspot.com/ blog.