questions about motorola microcontrollers and MCUs in general

Freescale. Sorry to pick nits, but Motorola doesn't make chips any more.

Dunno - hit the data sheets, & take a look.

The Stamps are -- you can program them in BASIC. _Anything_ will require programming, and a programming language. I don't think that a PIC would be any easier to write assembly code for than any other processor.

You can never have too much stuff.

No, you can buy bare chips. Getting a development board means you have something that works right off, though.

$59 is a good price. Some chips, PIC and AVR among them, are available in DIP packages and have on-board oscillators. These chips can be made to work just fine on a proto-board from Radio Shack. For all I know, the Freescale chip is the same.

Hi Joshua,

It is more powerfull than the PICs I have used before. I think every MCU is different. For each MCUs you need to know the details of the architecture. Also I think ASM and C are required.

Yes I think it is quite common for robotic applications. It also has fuzzy logic.

Yes, if you want to make your life easy. I think trying to make your own dev board for such a processor using breadboard will be hard. First problem is going to be how to hook up the package to a bread board which is probably PBGA (Plastic Ball Grid Array) or something similar.

No you dont need to buy the new board for every project as you can see this board has a 40 pin connector which provides access to most MCU I/O signals. So what you need is a connector to hook up to these pins with a wiring harness that connects to your bread board. You need some disapline to keep your wiring harness the same for every project and it will just work.

board pins -> connector -> wiring harness -> connector -> breadboard -> patch wires from connector area to development area on breadboard

Maybe you would like to consider some board like these ones if you are learning:

also consider S12X it is new and has some co-processing capability.

Maybe consider TI C2000 also.

Thanks,

Adam.

Don't confuse advertising with reality.

Suggest you concentrate less on "learning HC12" and more on learning how to solve problems with a microcontroller. Then in the future you will be prepared for the toughest and riskiest part of the design process: defining your requirements and shopping for solutions. If every problem looks like an HC12 solution, or PIC, or AVR, then you are not really giving others a fair shake.

The HC12 family are very good microcontrollers. Often I find they cost more than others but not always. AVR is pretty darn good all around with excellent free avr-gcc and very inexpensive in-circuit debuggers. Microchip PIC deserves being congratulated for being willing to be different, they basically rescued this market from Motorola's 6805 neglect. The 8051 variants deserve mention. If there is anything harder to code or more convoluted than a PIC, its an 8051. With hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of variants, if you can make an 8051 do your task then its probably the lowest cost in mass production.

1. In our days, there is no real difference which microcontroller to use. The choice is determined by preference; all vendors have similar offerings in the similar classes for the similar price.

1. Due to the old tradition, HC12 is big in the automotive applications. If your goal is working in that area, the knowledge of HCS12 is a plus.

2. HCS12 is not very simple, and the documentation is not very convenient either.

1. To start working with HCS12, you need a BDM programmer from PE micro. This is somewhat 0 of the initial investment.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

panfilero wrote:

You can use the serial port and the onboard monitor program DBug-12 which is on most development boards. No need for BDM programmers initially.

Thanks,

Adam.

Or, you can use the Serial Monitor on the C32 chip with the free uBug12, or my Pluto debugger.

By the way, the 9s12 chips are far stronger than any PIC or Basic Stamp. And the Arm is far stronger than the 9s12.

PIC = 8 bit data paths hc12/9s12 = 16 bit data paths Arm = 32 bit data paths

How much strength do you need as a hobbiest? I'd suggest looking at a very low priced chip called a Picaxe. These are similar to a Basic Stamp, but much cheaper. These are extremely easy to use and there's a free IDE for them.

Eric

USB-ML-12 is $99.00 at

That and free Metrowerks CodeWarrior is all one needs to get started coding, debugging, and programing devices. Can throw another $500 at P&E pretty easily but the most bang for the buck is in that first $99.

Microchip and Freescale parts are pretty hard to deal with unless one is using the manufacturer's IDE. AVR and ARM are much easier to use with independent tools.

Was very unhappy at the multitude of binary files CodeWarrior sprinkled in my directory hierarchy. Didn't like the way options were scattered all over the place in the IDE without one concise summary somewhere. MPLab has similar faults.

I really like having a plain text Makefile where all the compiler options, memory particulars, etc, are kept together where one can find it in an instant.

Please do not top-post. Your answer belongs after, or intermixed with, the material to which you reply, after snipping anything irrelevant. See the following links:

If you want to go even cheaper you can pick up a freescale development kit (DEMO9S12XDT512) which has BDM on board.

GCC is available for HC12:

A Perl based XGate asembler is available here:

Much more HC12 information here:

Yes, what I said the first time. Is not impossible, but pretty darn hard if one does not use the manufacturer's IDE.

Since when is it an engineer's or hobbyists job to give manufacturer's a fair shake? If you come to my office on a day when I'm looking for a break and not trying to get something out the door, and give me free dev tools, I'll take a look at your uP. But otherwise, my job is to get my job done, as efficiently and effectively as reasonably possible.

We use the MC9S12NE64, and HCS12 with ethernet. We use it extensively. Originally we got it for the ethernet, but we now use it a lot of places where that isn't used. Why? Because we had it around, had code that ran on it. And now, after over two years of working with it, I can only just claim to be starting to be really "good" with it. Sure- I got things working before, but I'm only just getting the full picture of what the options and concerns are.... as still building my bag of tricks for doing oddball things.

It isn't the only chip I work with. A lot of my code can compile on mulitple embedded processors and even for a windows pc. But when I need something reasonably capable, compact, easy for the production floor to get right, etc... a lot of problems do look like 9s12 shaped solutions. (Though there was that issue recently with the difference between a stock of 80-pin 9s1-shaped solutions and 112-pin shaped 9s12- problems... er, pcb boards)

Whoever said BGA's was way off base... these parts are mostly LQFP's - not too bad for hand soldering with care, though you will generally want a pc board.

Definitely no.

Look at

I use iSYSTEM iC3000 (expensive) but I'm not sure whether I would buy it again.

TBDML is close to "free".

Oliver

"manufacturer's IDEs" are (usually) evil. Use generic tools: a good text editor, make, Lint, subversion, doxygen.

For the HC(S)12, the Cosmic compiler works great and isn't harder to set up than CodeWorrier (bloatware IMO). You have to understand the options, anyway, don't you?

On the other hand, CW is free up to 32K code IIRC. Cosmic has to earn money.

I was not happy with GCCs code quality several years ago. Cosmic and CW produced much better code - hard to beat by hand crafted assembler. One has to check this carefully before starting.

Oliver

Last time I checked exchange rates, 300EUR was a lot more than the

You don't absolutely need a pod, but you will save yourself a lot of trouble getting one. I've recently discovered that my custom serial loader/updgrader is actually faster (we are talking less than half a minute either way though) but I have to get it in there somehow to begin with, and if I made a mistake and need to repgram the now "bricked" chip, the pod is indespensible.

Also I'm almost always using both serial ports, which would make a serial debugger difficult.

For the EUR300 you get also the great NoICE source level debugger, so the difference is less.

Where does Freescale "recommend" the P&E interface?

you _need_ it if you buy a bare S12 chip because they come without any loader or debugger. You don't need it if you buy a development board and don't erase the bootloader.

You definitely _want_ it because BDM (offering non-intrusive memory access) is one of the nicest things in the HCS12.

Oliver

A "cheap solution" would be the $99 P&E pod and the 32k code size limit special edition of codewarrior (free) - including a source level debugger.

The cheapskate soution would be trying to get by with no BDM pod at all. On that at least we seem in agreement.

As for the question of recommending it... the coldfire boards from freescale have a P&E pod built into them... I think we actually purchased our HCS12 ones through freescale, though I'll have to check the records to see if that is true. It's pretty obviously - official or not quite - the recommended step up from serial port only. Obviously there are more full featured solutions avaiable too.

I have a Freescale HCS12X demo board on my desk which has a P&E BDM built in and is only $85 from digikey (DEMO9S12XDT512).

Andy

By working with the MCU I mean working on the real device. To do that, one needs a standalone BDM and a software to it at the least. Playing with the eval board is worseless. The eval board can be interesting only as a reference design.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

"Vladimir Vassilevsky" a écrit dans le message de news: NBBEh.1750$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr25.news.prodigy.net...

Hi, Several eval boards (9S08QG8, 9SGB60 for example) contains a 6 pins connector to program / debug an external target just by adding a 6 net wires. It work with 9s08 and 9s12.

Yvan