Newbie: Which MCU/kit to Start?

In cellular phones, microwave ovens, air cleaners and lots of other growth markets ;-)

For standard products, chips are developed using both cores.. Atmel has two design centres working on the AVR, one design centre working on the 8051 one design centre which works with both.

For ASIC/ASSPs it is either ARM or AVR; and no or very little 8051s.

You see the starlight in the engineers eyes when he is allowed to use the AVR. I have never seen that happen to 8051 engineers.

Yep, I am happily working with both the AVR and the ARM.

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson   ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com
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Ulf Samuelsson
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Hi Stephen,

This is such a common issue, though, that they do have programs in place to deal with it. Three or four years ago, that was an issue for us too - but in more recent times, the distris say "Yes, give us the name of your purchasing agent in the Orient and we'll do the paperwork to make sure we get credited for the sale".

I have a beef with dealing with distris per se. It's simply adding a useless middleman to the support equation. The only thing distributors are diligent about is calling me at inconvenient times asking if I want to buy some overpriced parts.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

Is this statement including ASICs and other parts that can't feasibly be bought in small volumes, though? I based my comment on an examination of standard parts from Winbond, Atmel and Maxim (Dallas). It seemed to me that the range of available parts was very fragmented. If you look at the entire market, there's a smooth spectrum of parts to match any possible application. If you look at one particular vendor, there are big notches in the spectrum, and it's not necessarily easy to move between vendors (certainly not drop-in).

Hence my basic assertion, which was that '51 is a great choice when you have a reasonably well-specified project, but if you simply have a need to learn "an MCU family" in order to undertake numerous disparate projects, it's easier and cheaper (much cheaper) to pick a family with a relatively broad range of devices, all offered from a single source with some notes on porting amongst those parts, rather than having to keep tabs on multiple vendors.

Basically, that narrowed the list down to PIC, MSP430 and AVR. Further analysis, including devtool cost and the specific requirements of the family of projects I was discussing, further narrowed me down to AVR (although either of the other two would have done the job perfectly adequately).

Okay, the range of standard products is larger than just the basic

8051, but if you take any specific 51-cored MCU, I think the odds are against you finding an *exact* replacement from another vendor. *Something* will be different - peripherals, I/O voltage tolerance, type/size of code memory, flash algorithms, ... And almost doesn't count in this case.
Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

;) My manuscript deadline is 5/31/04 but I am running a little ahead of schedule (fx: beating head on wooden plank), so I'm hoping it will be on the shelves towards the start of Q3.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

You know, I didn't even think of eZ8. Hmm.

Well... I didn't go into that detailed a level of analysis, since it's not the primary thrust of the book. But it strikes me that someone has probably already written a white paper on this topic.

Reply to
Lewin A.R.W. Edwards

I had this problem 20 years ago but from about 10 years ago most of the majors addressed the issue so you could not only get the tech support from the UK office (not distro) but you could get volume prices in USD landed in China from the UK office too.

It's all volume related. Once the product quantities are large enough you can bypass the ditributor.

Ian

Reply to
Ian Bell

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