Cheap Microcontrollers

No idea. Depends on what I can haggle. In many cases you get free tools :-)

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\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills  Staffs  England     /\/\/\/\/
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Reply to
Chris Hills
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This will do everything you are asking for:

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Martin

Reply to
Martin Walton

Wow, quite an informative topic here.

If I may, common sense tells me that the price comparisons of well- established parts from a catalog are going to be reflective of the price that can be negotiated for larger sales. Economically, every manufacturer and resaler has its costs to recoup in addition to the profit it makes from a sale. Purchasing larger quantities reduces the markup needed for the sale to still be profitable, but the underlying manufacturing and distributing costs remain. In the long run, there will only be so much of the profit margin that can be squeezed out of the total cost. Assuming these margins are similar between manufacturers, then the catalog price should give an indication of which part is cheaper. But that's just common sense, experience seems to say otherwise.

I'm digging alot of the new products that have a trimmable internal oscillator. The added cost of these parts makes up for the fact that it would be easy to precisely tune the cpu clock at runtime for asynchronous communication instead of needing an external ceramic resonator. The RS08 from Freescale is approaching the price point in catalogue distribution, too bad it's limited to 40ma max. Not quite enough for 3 high brigtness LED's.

Martin, as for the Color Kinetics chromasic chip, we actually looked at using it a while ago until we found out they were charging $3 a chip. Why pay this much when I can make the same effect from a 30 cent micro :).

Reply to
Zach_G

Experience 5-10 years ago perhaps, the movement today is different.

If you look at newest-release parts going into the catalog companies, they DO have high-volume columns, and the IC vendors DO realise MANY designers eyeball those, and so real care is taken to have them mean something. The WEB is a powerful sales force.

I've even seen a couple have 'promo releases' where the low qty parts, are sold at 1000+ prices. Probably that is subsidised by the IC supplier. Also, many samples are now provided via the catalogue pathway, and again, there must be a payment from IC supplier for that saving in not needing a samples dept.

eg Go to Digikey, and search for "W79E8", and you will see low winbond prices given (no stock) - so here, Digikey is effectively running a price-book service for Winbond.

You could parallel more pins, or add external drivers ? If you choose a LIN style comms, then the tolerance drops.

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

Most uC can do serial port with internal RC clock. How fast are you running the serial port. Upto 19K baud should not be a problem.

Don't skim on a penny transistor, if you are using high power LEDs.

Reply to
linnix

Well 108K baud is the minimum. For 8 bit transmission with start and stop the maximum theoretical timing error between sender and reciever is +-4%. Throw in a long noisy capacitive cable and reliable transmission timing error should be +-1% by rule of thumb.

Aye, this is an alternative if an entire SOC isn't feasible.

Reply to
Zach_G

If going the PIC route then I'd suggest going directly to Microchip. Especially if you're in the US - shipping is relatively cheap. The majority of their controllers can be bought from Microchip Direct even in single chip quantities. Only the rarer ones need bulk quantities. But the OP is asking about bulk quantities so I'd recommend going directly to Microchip:

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at the very least it gives you a good idea on prices.

The very cheap ones, in bulk quantities:

PIC10F200 , 0.25k flash - $0.39 PIC10F202 , 0.5k flash - $0.41 PIC16F54 , 0.5k flash - $0.37 PIC16F57 , 2k flash - $0.49 PIC12F508 , 0.5k flash - $0.47 PIC12F509 , 1k flash - $0.50

One nice thing I like about PICs is that they tend to hang around a lot longer than other controllers. I started on the PIC16F84 long before Atmel introduced their AVRs and while most of the earlier generation AVRs have been discontinued the PIC16F84 is still around.

Reply to
slebetman

Their programming service is also pretty cheap.

Reply to
Mike Harrison

Huzzah, Sonix has a 30 cent chip that fits the bill. Thanks for all your help everybody.

Reply to
Zach_G

So, satisfy our curiosity... which one?

Reply to
DJ Delorie

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