How do I get current?

MSP430, ARM, AVR, 6812, colddragonfireball (or whatever the 68K stuff is now called by Motorola (or whatever that division/spinoff is called now)). Of course there are still eleventy-thousand different flavors of the 8051.

And, if you enjoy shoving an icepick through your eyeball into your brain, there's always the microchip PIC family.

I'm rather fond of the the MSP430 for smallish projects (that don't need an external bus and will fit in 64K of code+data). You can easily get into that for $50. There's a $20 widget from TI:

Or you can get good cheap Olimex boards and JTAG interfaces from sparkfun:

The '149 or '169 boards are good starter boards if you want to solder on some stuff of your own:

You can downlad the free IAR "kickstart" tools/IDE (limited to

4K of code)

Or there's gcc:

For anything that won't fit in an MSP430, you probably ought to jump to an ARM from Atmel or somebody. I also like the larger versions of the Hitachi H8 family (32-bit internal, 24 bit address space, with external bus), but the selection of ARM based parts is wider.

--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  ... I want to perform
                                  at               cranial activities with
                               visi.com            Tuesday Weld!!

Well, close. I'd go with more of a rusty spike than an icepick. ;-)

I still find 5 volts Vcc and 0.1" pitch form-factors handy for one-offs so I tend to reach for an AVR as a default family, and then MSP430 or ARM if that's not a good fit. (Of course, there are low voltage and surface mount devices in the AVR family, as well.)

I'd pitch the OP to just get a couple of ATmega8's and start designing. Many resources out there on the net but a good starting place is

--
Rich Webb   Norfolk, VA

I believe it is spelled 'icePIC'

PIC, like Java, is one of those product names that has spawned umpteen really horrific puns and cute names for spinoff products. Argh. Hate, hate, hate.

I believe it is spelled "Arrrggghh"

;)

>

In article , JoeyB writes

Most of the stuff you are used to.... the rate of change in the embedded world is not the same as in the desktop. The new kid on the block is ARM but this is 32 bit...

Go with your 6811 stuff, get back into the swing of things again and then try a chap ARM board.

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\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
/\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org      www.phaedsys.org \/\/\
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Subscribe to electronic version of CircuitCellar for few $ and reading through you can get lots of info. Google, because if you want to do something, someone may have already done it and you have a chance to learn from them and start-off where they finished.

ARM architecture is quite popular and many manufacturers make the compatible MCUs. You can get $25 ARM7-stamp board from Futurlec, it comes with eval of C/C++ compiler.

Microchip is popular but if you are going to program in assembler, stay away from 14-bit series. There is a zillion websites on Microchip MCUs and some C/C++ compilers with limited demo editions (CCS, HiTech, IAR or Microchip's own C18). Look also at their dsPIC33 or PIC24 series, it's good stuff, although $129 eval board is little over your $50 budget. Btw. Microchip has been very good with free samples, they do not even charge the shipping.

Atmel AVR is popular and you can get $20 Butterfly eval kit for starters and go to

for more information.

TI has also advertised a $20 kit.

You may like to check out these websites:

You could do worse than a Rabbit module (ideally with a development board to give you easy access). This'll give you TCP/IP, and a semi-decent [1] C development platform. Modules are cheap, and the development code is either free or $small_sum (brain's gone, sorry).

[1] It's not *entirely* standard C. It makes use of .lib files (which are actually C files) rather than .h header files... But this is fairly easy to deal with (and I'm happy to help). Other than that, it's a stonkingly good system.

Steve not associated with Rabbit. Happy customer.

Wow. Thanks all for your comments. Looks like some great leads that I'll now pursue. I've tried for that last few weeks to simply surf the net and come to some realistic conclusions but there's so much stuff out there for so many applications that it becomes bewildering.

Thanks again.

Wanna real treat? Talk about embedded coumputers:Join a high school robotics club:

the equipment: videos of a match: I've done this for 3 years. I'm 53 and these kids showed me a whole new world. Uses MicoChip controllers with nice C++ IDE. Amazing.

I'm pretty sure ARM is the 8051 for the years to come. Philips has a nice range of devices starting at prices as low as USD 1.4 IIRC. There are other of course.

What about it?

Steven

I got involved with the First Lego League for the last two years with a local school and it was great fun. Well worth it just to work with kids and introduce them to basic engineering skills that no one had ever shown them before.

Try the high school kids, now. It's amazing what they know, I learned far more from them, then them from me!

That Lego's is really cool, huh?

>

In my area it was only kids aged between 9 and about 13 that were taking part because the Lego kits are comparitively expensive compared to other schemes available to the older kids. I'd love to get back into it again but in my new job I have to commute and hour and a half each way so I can't get to the schools in time. I still help setting and judging competitions organised at weekends and the schools in my area do quite a few different projects. I recently marshalled an electric car race which was fun and great for the kids.

Cool enough for me to get a mindstorms kit for christmas Now that the girlfriend has finished teacher training I might actually get access to my PC to start tinkering with it. I'm planning to start looking at BrickOS which is a linux kernel someone has got running on the RCX. There was a newsgroup for that sort of thing but it's gone very quiet.

Apparently there is a new version of mindstorms coming out which is even clevererer