Hi, I'm Tomás, I'm a college student and I'm doing an embedded systems project for my degree this year.
I'm using the 74HCT family of chips on my board, (e.g. 74HCT4543 for a BCD to 7-seg decoder).
Anyway I'm wondering if there's a good way of finding the chip I want for a given purpose without going on a wild goose chase? For instance, I want an 8-to-3 encoder but I haven't a clue what the code is for the chip. When I try google for it I get a menagerie of crap links.
Is there any sort of site out there where I can type in 16-to-4 encoder and it will give me a nice list of possible chips? (In the 74HCT family most pertinently)
One other thing, I'm using a MAN74 7-seg display (which is common- cathode) on my board; does anyone know the code for an identical display but which is common-anode? (I've tried googling for stuff like MAN73 and MAN75 but to no avail).
Another thing, the software side of the project is being programmed in standard C (C89 to be exact). I've heard that some C compilers for microcontrollers are a bit funky when it comes to abiding by the standard. Are there any boobie traps I should watch out for? One thing I heard about, and I can't remember to which compiler they were referring, was that the compiler in question stores automatic variables as static data rather than on a stack, meaning that the machine will explode if I use recursive functions (not to mention the waste of memory). Other little complications would be that the integer types don't follow the rules (such as sizeof(char)