chipKIT™ is an Arduino™ compatible hardware/software system that uses the Microhip PIC32 microcontroller rather than the Atmel AVR microcontroller. The chipKIT hardware has been designed to be functionally compatible with the Arduino boards. Many existing Arduino shields will work with the chipKIT boards.
The chipKIT IDE, the Multi-Platform IDE (MPIDE) is functionally compatible with the Arduino IDE. In fact, the MPIDE is built from a copy of the same source code as the Arduino IDE and still supports the standard Arduino boards.
The PIC32 microcontroller uses a MIPS M4K processor core. The M4K is a 32-bit RISC architecture that provides a very high performance microcontroller computing platform.
The PIC32 supports the following features:Digilent produces several boards in the chipKIT line. These include the microcontroller boards themselves, plus several I/O boards called shields.
The Digilent chipKIT line contains the following boards:Additionally, Digilent has the Cerebot line of microcontroller boards. These boards provide the ability to work with the Arduino/chipKIT compatible MPIDE development environment. They also provide the ability to easily use the powerful, professional development tools from Microchip such as the MPLAB IDE.
The Cerebot line includes the following boards:The Cerebot boards are also designed to make use of the extensive line of Pmod peripheral modules available from Digilent. The Pmods provide numerous I/O devices and interface modules.