help: Choosing a MicroController (HAM radio) and some other points

...

Because the teacher said so.

Cheers! Rich

(ham

quite

Many microcontrollers suit your needs. But I would recommend the ATmega32. Plenty of flash and RAM for you, DIP package, ISP etc. The board is supported by numerous free programmers, or you can buy the official development board (STK500) which is

"renjith" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

Well,

Have a look at the Atmel site.

The ATmega8 for instance seems to fullfill all your needs. Programming circuits can be found easily and you can also find a GNU C-compiler for free.

You can also find similar PIC and 8051 controllers so what strange regulations make you have to look for others?

petrus bitbyter

When did ham radio get to be HAM radio? "Ham" is not an abbreviation.

VY 73 N4TMI

P.S. I know the story about H.A.M. standing for the names of 3 ships, and I know that it's pure fiction.

Thanks a lot petrus and l..., I took a look at the ATMega series and many of the uC's there seem highly suitable for my needs. However could you also mention a list of other possible uC's just for information sake if you dont mind ? Someone suggested the Motorola 68xxx series to me which I've also looked at and seem promising but I haven't heard anyone else mention about it. Thanks a lot for your suggestions and I'd really appreciate any other feedback.

Anybody can make up a story. That doesn't make it true. Besides, if it were true, the names would be definite, and verifiable... as it is, they vary from version to version.

"Ham radio" is from "ham actor" and refers to the amateur entertainment that was often broadcast by early radio experimenters. Hams weren't prohibited from broadcasting until after WWI.

And you still don't, because as far as I can determine, that story is pure fantasy. Why would a "Mexican ship" have a name that is almost unpronounceable in Spanish?

Given the Harvard connection, it sounds as if it might have been made up as a tall tale by students. But I don't know that. At minimum, does the Harvard Wireless Club have any records that support it?

I should add one more thing.

There may well have been one or more early stations whose operators' initials were H, A, and M. That doesn't make that the origin of the term "ham radio." The usually accepted origin is that it comes from "ham actor."

Arguing strongly against the Hyman et al. theory is that nobody wrote "ham" as an abbreviation ("HAM", "H.A.M."), as far as I can tell, until the 1990s. It is always "ham radio," not "HAM radio" or "H.A.M. radio," in publications from more than 10 or 15 years ago.

One often overlooked microcontroller is the Zilog Encore Z8. It is a

3.3V process, comes in DIP, supports C (they have a compiler for it, it's not GCC) and supports source level debugging through a debug pin. Look at the website. They usually have eval kits (I got one a few years ago for less than $100) which comes with a processor, some peripherals, a couple of RS232 ports (one for debugging, one for talking to the thing through the UART).

I found it quite nice, until I discovered PICs. The main advantage I find with PICs are that they come in 8 pin, internal clock packages. Thus, they are that they are incredibly simple to prototype with.

--
Regards,
   Robert Monsen

"Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
     - Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon,
        on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.

If you are wanting to compare microcontrollers, you could always look at the Motorola HC08 series. A table of features is at:

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP       
Microsoft: The Standard Oil Company of the 21st century

How about the story of messrs. Hyman, Almy and Murray?

73!

--

Tauno Voipio, OH2UG
tauno voipio (at) iki fi

Hi, Try to "search" the Internet for projects similar to your project. There are many HAM radio projects utilizing different microcontrollers. Some use PIC microcontrollers, some AVR, some '51, some ... A small collection of pages that I have in my "bookmarks" :

Best regards, Jacek.

Here is that story:

Interesting, I had no idea where it came from before.

--
Roger J.

I would recommend the 8051 and its variants. Philips make a good range with various sizes of code and data spaces and all have ISP. There are many free simulators available and many of the major IDE vendors have evaluation versions with a 2K or 4K code limit to get you going in C. For bigger programs you can use the free C compiler SDCC.

Ian

--
Ian Bell

You will find plenty of more information on the AVR on the

website. Tools:

• AVR Studio - Assembler/Debugger/Simulator/ICE Frontend.

• STK500 - Development Kit/includes an In System Programmer

• JTAGICE Mk II - Low cost emulator, allows you to download code, run, set breaks and singlstep.

• WinAVR - gcc compiler for the AVR

Some commercial compilers

• IAR

• Imagecraft (Hi Richard!)

• Codevision

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
This message is intended to be my own personal view and it
may or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

"mc" wrote

Right, it's an acronym. AIUI, Home Amateur Mechanic was a real magazine that ran real articles about building your own amateur radios.

Apparently that's an urban legend.

"Unfortunately for this story, none of it checks out. A past president of the ARRL did extensive research in an attempt to confirm this story. There is nothing in the Congressional record about little station HAM. There is nothing in contemporary press records. And there is no record of a Hyman, Almay, or Murray at Harvard at the time this supposedly happened. This story first surfaced in an amateur publication in 1948, and doesn't seem likely to die. But it appears to have no factual basis."

Of the 80C51 variants, the easiest to get going, because it includes On-Chip debug, is the SiLabs C8051F family. These also have low cost eval PCBs, so if you want to skip PCB layout, sub $30 gets you the 064 Eval kit, with dual USB links, one for data, one for debug. For small volume usage, they have one device in DIP20, but they do not target that sector. Others with on-chip debuggers are Winbond, and ST's new uPSD3400 series have a lot of resource.

-jg

So do the Z8 Flash parts ? ( but only recently )

-jg