Re: uC selection

"Jon Slaughter" <Jon_Slaughter@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


<a7yvm109gf5d1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:86a4146e-ddcc-40aa-8316-5ded547c1fc9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 14, 7:14 pm, "Jon Slaughter" <Jon_Slaugh...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Currently I use microchip pics but I'm looking possibly to switch, but
what?
Is Atmel worth it? What about TI? I'm looking for something similar to
microchip but more of a commercial aspect. I have never seen any
commercial
device that uses a pic and I assume there are reasons for this? It seems
that pic's are only for hobbiests so using them in a commercial product
is a
no-no?

It's spelled "hobbyist". Just like "lobbyist".
PICs are used in cheap, high volume applications where you won't even
see the part number or logo.
What language do you program in? What kind of applications? Simple
button-LCD-I2C or more complex signal processing?

I have programmed in a large number of languages and thats not really the
issue(python, php, C/C++/C#, java, assembly, pascal, etc..). The main thing
is the funcitonality and scalability.

I'm looking at TI's chips right now and trying to see how consistent the
chips are. I am not doing any advanced uC system's yet(just adc and pwm
stuff ATM) but eventually I'd like to get into dsp(audio processing) and
other stuff. I don't want to have to learn a new chip every time I move to a
new application or be limited by the architecture. PIC's seem more like
entry level more than anything else and I feel like the time invested in
learning them might not pay off in the long run.

The only reason I'm using pic's now is cause of how easy was to get started
and the majority of it was free/low cost(tools, chips, programmer, etc...).

atmel AVR's seem similar to intel chips which I am used too as I used to do
a lot of programming(although its been years) in x86. I'm not at all sure
about TI and AD chips but looking at TI's now.

If you want to program in C, stay away from Harvard architecture chips
(like AVR and TI's DSPs). The seperate code and data memory makes the
instruction set complex (opcodes that could be used for nifty stuff
are now used to deal with something stupid like memory) and it causes
a huge amount of overhead because a C pointer must be translated into
the proper memory space first.


--
Programmeren in Almere?
E-mail naar nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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