Hiya-
Two camps pretty much in the little microcontroller market
microchip and atmel's.
They are both *FUN*. Really a gas. I'm in the microchip
camp (nothing wrong with ATMEL). You can whomp up a
programmer for next to nothing. I *BOUGHT* a kit for $14.99
after I breadboarded it. The assembler and simulator are
free.
For $2.00 in quantity 25's you can buy parts from Digikey.
1's are about $3.00. At microchip the *USED* to give out
free samples (still might).
They are a gas to play with. Have done several projects
with them including:
photography enlarger timer
100MHz frequency counter
EEPROM programmer
Tune player with easy programming of tunes
Bipolar stepper controller
"Geek" clock with BCD led lights
And these are the fun projects. Have used them in
professional designs as well.
I like "Nigel's" PIC tutorial to start with. He
suggests a 16F628 PIC chip as a starting chip to play with
There are *LOTS* of stuff on the web. Just do a search
for PIC and stand back........
PICLIST from MIT is good. also the Yahoo group PICLIST.
A couple of free books on the web too.
I'm sure the same is true with ATMEL.
Both little critters have flash program memory (up to 16K
bytes), some ram, uarts, some have A/Ds, and tons of I/O.
EEPROM for non-volitile memory.
The fun thing is to see how much you can do on the chip
without extra logic.
The little geek clock had 4 resistors, a 78L05 regulator
and I think 21 LEDs (I don't remember, I have it at work).
One wit said (and it's true) "Why use a 555 timer when
there are PICs!"
A lot of fun stuff to play with with little or no capital
investment.
Program in assembly, C or even ladder logic.
If you haven't looked, it's a lot more fun than the old
8051s.
Cheers,
Rich S.
