Electronic Supplies, Microcontroller choice question.

If you are just starting out using microcontrollers, Pic micro and basic stamps are good ones to start with. There are many websites and magazines that provide help for the chips. Eval board are nice to have, for learning. You can get the evals with breadboard attached to test your circuits.

SOIC is a packaging for surface mount.

Metcal has some good soldering irons but are expensive. To start, get a reasonably priced iron from radio shack and try it out.

For part, visit

Have fun

for the SOIC to DIP converting I would suggest using a breakout board. I've already ordered mine for a project for school :) Some semiconductor companies give out only SOIC free samples, so I decided to buy a few of these adaptors so I can use it for prototyping. Go to

and check out all their cool stuff! the direct link to their breakout board is here:

If you're really in the dark this may be the way to go, but with all the teeny packages these days the world is moving in the direction of designing PCBs for 1st-article testing. Even a PCB with a 144-pin chip turned over on its back and soldered in with 144 little green wires is better than a breadboard.

I haven't used FreePCB; none the less I would recommend Eagle, if you can fit your board into the free version. It _has_ a free version, it has a stepped pricing scheme as you need more layers and size, and it has gotten good reviews here. I haven't actually shipped gerber files off and gotten boards back, but I have generated good looking gerbers with it.

I think once you've done your research you'll know more than most of us. Check the resource requirements for uCLinux -- you'll have to bypass quite a few useful smaller (and easier to use) parts because of that requirement. I suspect that uCLinux will have a big enough RAM footprint that you'll need off-chip RAM and possibly off-chip flash as well, which means a lot more board work. Along with compiler availability I'd suggest that you consider the following:

• Make sure you get the peripherals you want. You'll want at least one asynchronous serial port for debugging, and possibly one for whatever apps you want to run. Synchronous serial is good for connecting ADCs, DACs (and UARTs); if you just run it to a connector run a bunch of general-purpose I/O to the same connector.

• If you make expansion connectors give them plenty of grounds. Alternating signal with ground would not be too much overkill.

• I _always_ put at least one indicator LED to an I/O pin. Put something in the code that depends on the correct operation of your OS to make the LED blink. If it stops blinking you know that something is seriously wrong. Using this as a fault indicator is good in a "real" system, and getting it going is a good first exercise when you're bringing a board up for the first time (and it's incredible how cheered a manager can be when they see a board blinking away like the computer in "Desk Set").

All the manufacturers make sure that you get mechanical drawings of their chips to see the packaging, and some have recommended board layouts.

There are breadboard adapters out there.

Metcal has been mentioned. It will get you there in style for a very high price. If I had a production lab I'd stock it with Metcal tools. I use a Weller temperature-controlled iron (WTCPT) that suits me just fine.

It's kind of a Ford vs. BMW argument.

_Don't_ try to do this with some cheapo thing from Rat-Shack. Even a good Weller that doesn't have temperature control will be difficult to use with tiny surface-mount components.

In the US:

New parts:

Surplus:

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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

You should probably select your family of processor first, purchase an existing development board and make sure you can do everything on it that you want, including ucLinux. The select your specific processor and make the exact PCB that you want.

I'm not aware of any PIC products that run ucLinux Atmel has several board that run ucLinux.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: [...]

I'd suggest the Silicon Labs AKA

series of controllers. The whole developement kit will run you $100US or $150US depending on whether you want the turbo charged model or not.

They seem to support them well enough. The documentation is huge but even at that not really complete.

What do you mean by stable in this context. Do you mean likely to remain available or unlikely to contain bugs in the silicon. Their parts seem ok on both of these.

In your wildest dreams! OSes are for wimps anyway. There's only a couple of K of RAM.

There is a free C and ASM in the kit. Free 8051 assemblers are easy to find on the web. The Cygnal part has an 8051 core.

[...]

Most of them are quite stiff.

The Cygnal part has 16 channels of ADC, a couple of DACs, a hand full of counter/timers, a couple of UARTs, some SPI stuff, and a bunch of other things.

The Cygnal part is fairly low powered if you shut down all the extras and drop the clock speed.

The Cygnal kit comes with the chip mounted on a PCB. You wire from it to your prototype, usually via a connector.

If you have money, get a Metcal.

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kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge

I have also started with programming with microcontroller. i m basically interested with mine detector controlling robot.I have started with 8051 family micocontrollers.i will keep u update with my proress.