Re: Purchase microcontroller dev. kit

"David L. Jones" <altzone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nico Coesel wrote:
Donald <donald@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nico Coesel wrote:

mrdarrett@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


Nico Coesel wrote:

ydoubleuz@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


Hi all,

I am new to this and i hope to purchase a development kit for dev.
microcontrollers. Due to the numerous varieties available in the
market, i am lost as where i should start and what stuffs to look out
for when purchasing these kits.

Whatever you buy, make sure the microcontroller has one addressing
space (no 8051, no AVR, no PIC) if you want to keep your code
portable. You wouldn't be the first developer who has found the
platform that looked so promising in the past turns out to be a
deadlock.


No 8051, no AVR, no PIC? What *would* you recommend, then? ;-)


Hitachi/Renesas H8 / H8S, Texas Instruments MSP430, Analog Devices
Blackfin DSP.


Oh crap, now you did IT !!!

The religous war about my CPU is better than your CPU is going to start.

No not at all. Look at the big picture here. Its not the CPU that
matters, its where you want to go in the future that matters!

A choice for a CPU should be driven by the question: "What if I want
to move to a different platform". With some platforms the answer to
this question is: "throw away everything you wrote and start over". So
a choice for a platform should be made with great care.

There is NO best processor, this is too small or too large, but you will
learn this for yourself.

That's exactly why I listed a general purpose microcontroller series,
a micropower series and a full blown 300+ MHz 32 bit DSP with MMU
capable of running a genuine OS like Linux. However, generic C code
written for one, can be moved to the other.

Gee that's stange, how on earth have I moved C code almost seamlessly
from a PIC to an AVR to a Rabbit then?

try to compile the following on an AVR:
const char a[]={"hello world"}
char b[30];
char *p;

p=a;
strcpy(b,p);
strcat(b, "?");
printf("%s %s", a, b);

It won't work because the different memory areas will screw-up the
pointers. Some very smart and expensive compilers may be able to solve
these problems at the expense of speed.

You can't be serious suggesting that a beginner think about the "big
picture" and choose some oddball processor based on some perceived
future requirement, that is crazy.

Oddball?? I wouldn't call the MSP 430 series oddball (lots of people
are using these). You don't even need a programmer to program it! An
RS232 to TTL converter (or a USB to serial converter chip) is enough
to get going.

A beginner needs something that is common beginner platform so that
they can get tons of support, sample code, books and other beginner
level stuff etc That basically means PIC or AVR these days, that's
where the action is.

So we should all be like lemmings? Even if the first one that jumps
into the water drowns, the rest should follow?

Besides, you make my point exactly: if you choose PIC, then you're
stuck with PIC examples. If you choose a processor for which any
generic C code can be compiled, you can use any piece of C code you
can get your hands on.

--
Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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