Good startup microcontroller devel kits

My son is doing just this with an AVR Dragon and his own hardware. You can get Bare Bones Boards with just the ATMega CPU and an ISP port. Total investment way under $100.

For a somewhat fancier architecture, try out the STMF100 demo board, which is a low-end ARM Cortex M3, but with 12-bit ADC and two 12-bit DACs. The CPUs are a buck, and the demo board is under $10, total. It comes with three demo development systems, but for stuff that's less than 32k compiled, they stay free.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Some people may groan, but the PIC might be a good starting point. The PIC-Kit is very popular, There is a online forum for help. Lots of thru-hole parts, available online. The assembler is free, and the C compiler is 30 day, with optimizations disabled after that. There is lots of stuff located on the microchip site and on the Piclist (even a good tutorial on the PIC's paging register, PCLATH)

For more performance a STM kit with the ARM cortex is available from various mfg's. It?s a different animal. But has more potential.

Cheers

What do you think does he want to do?

The answer might be very different if he wants to ...

- twiddle bits, blink LEDs and time things

- do something with USB

- do something with Ethernet (Bluetooth etc.)

- do something with a touch screen color display

In general, assembly-only is mostly useful for the first item above, but it never hurts to know the underlying machine code.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

"The Journey is the reward"

eff.com

OK, I know next to nothing about uCs. But I need to take the plung. I'd like to do some timing (~10 ns edges) and maybe some A to D. We've already go some pic stuff so that seems the easy choice. But I'm open to other ideas,

George H.

A very small sampling of what is out there:

mike

The Arduino forces you into doing development by burn-and-crash, though--there's no in-circuit debugging support.

Low-end development tools that run over ISP, e.g. the PicKit 3, the AVRDragon (both 8-bit), the LPCXpresso

STM32VLDiscovery let you use real debuggers--you can single-step, have breakpoints and watchpoints, and so forth. They're mostly cheaper than an Arduino, too.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

enig7E2849E9689B6DD36ECF8722 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

PICs cover a fair bit of range and have a range of peripherals. Availability has been excellent, and I actually like their free IDE with its simulation capability. Bigger chips can use a GCC-based C compiler.

I'm tending towards the TI Stellaris ARM series these days for jobs that require more horsepower and serious Ethernet capability. Probably about the biggest processor that I'd want without a real OS and all the attendant stuff (MMU, SDRAM etc.).

In both cases, for 10ns you'll most likely need to tap the on-chip peripherals or stick some logic outside the chip. On-chip A/D converters can be okay for non-demanding applications. ADI has some ARM and 8051s that are more like a decent ADC with a processor on board.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

arduino?

AIUI They can be single-stepped if you use a real AVR programmer instead of relying on the arduino serial bootloader.

--
?? 100% natural

Just curious...why would anyone groan?

I haven't used the PIC, and haven't even looked at the architecture or instruction set. But I've seen so much mention of it that I assumed it would be very well supported in the 'hobbyist community'. There's got to be a C compiler that doesn't time out, right? (I thought there was a GNU compiler)

Also, is there provision for doing PC-based single-step and debugging?

Thanks, Martin.

From my very limited research on this so far, I haven't come away with a positive impression of Arduino.

Some good leads in both of your posts, Phil. Thanks.

Single-step and debug is important. One of the major objectives is to see what's going on in the CPU. Is it correct to assume that you meant the PicKit 3 would be fairly functional in most respects? Any serious down side compared to the others that you mentioned?

I would second the ARM Cortex based demo boards in the $10-20 range. You can get free compilers for small projects with powerful debugging.

If he wants something more retro and bare metal then the old PIC series

16f877 stuff is fairly entertaining and there are hobbyist development kits for DIY assembly and free tools in the same price range. Obviously much less powerful than an ARM core but also somewhat easier to grasp. Getting a bit long in the tooth now but a good introduction even so.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[snip]

I have been using the Microchip PIC products for more than ten years and =

they have been very good for all my needs. I have done work with USB and =

serial communication and a little bit with Ethernet, and also some motor =

control. The MPLAB SIM software debugger is very powerful and you can = pretty=20 much design and build and test your application without even having a=20 development board. The PICkit3 is a good tool (although Dave Jones = bashed=20 their early version:

review/

It prompted a response from Microchip and even a phone call from their = CEO,=20 Steve Sanghi, whom I have met at the Microchip MASTERS conferences. The=20 forum is extremely helpful and supportive, while the official tech = support=20 ticket response, not so much.

There are other microcontrollers that have jumped into the market = recently=20 and some of them are extremely capable and interesting, but I think=20 Microchip may have the widest usage in the professional world, = especially at=20 the low-end to middle-range applications that are probably 90% of the = market=20 in terms of quantity.

You can't go too far wrong with a debugger/programmer and a small demo = board=20 for less than $50.

Paul=20

Get a PicKit3 for about $45 inluding a small demo board. Allows single stepping / debugging etc etc via a USB interface. It comes with C18 a microchip C package, the optimisation is limited but it works & isn't time limited.

Chris,

You (or he) might want to look at the Texas Instruments MSP430 low-power 16-bit series and their LaunchPad board ($4.30):

MSP430 LaunchPad Home

The latest revision of the board includes two MSP430s (one each MSP430G2553 and MSP430G2452), both with flash, RAM, serial, and onboard ADC.

There are two compiler/IDEs available: Code Composer Studio v4 and IAR Embedded Workbench. Both, as I recall, offer single-step debugging. For Linux users there's gcc, and a beta version of CCS v5.x-for-Linux.

Get two of these plus TI's $19 RF "booster pack"and you have an RF link you can play with.

In terms of community support, TI hosts its "E2E" message board, there's a Yahoo MSP430 group, and the 43oh site:

TI: MSP430 TI-E2E Forum

Yahoo/msp430 : TI MSP430 microcontroller users group

Four-Three-Oh! | MSP430 News, Projects and Forums

Enjoy...

Frank McKenney

--
  No good explanation can predict the outcome, or the probability of
  an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be signifi-
  cantly affected by the creation of new knowledge.  This is a
  fundamental limitation on the reach of scientific prediction, and,
  when planning for the future, it is vital to come to terms with it.
  ...  Trying to know the unknowable leads inexorably to error and
  self-deception.  Among other things, it creates a bias toward
  pessimism.
                   -- David Deutsch / The Beginning of Infinity

;)

My son Simon recently switched from Arduino to an AVRDragon and AVR Studio 5, which is based on Visual Studio. Even with having to rewrite the library code he was using, he's much happier with it than with Arduino.

"I can see what it's actually doing! How cool is that?"

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(A bit bad-tempered this morning due to some payment issues with a large Far Eastern customer which will remain nameless.)

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

The PicKit 3 is fine as long as you like PICs. I've used PIC and AVR, but now that 24-MHz Cortex M3s with 12-bit A/D and D/A are down below two bucks, it hardly makes sense to use them anymore. Great learning vehicle though--they have all the essential elements.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

My experience with MC is much different. My place of employment and many of our customers consider MC to be an unreliable company - first version of ICs missing functions, cores not correctly copied from one version of an IC to another, etc.

And then MC sales engineers lie and say there is no problem, until the next version of the die is released, then reported problems magically come to life in errata. FU MC. Die. Die. Die.

Because of the paging scheme.