Re: OSS-friendly PC-connected PIC-type board?

John Stumbles <john.stumbles@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sorry about all the hyphens :-)

I want to play^H^H^H^Hexperiment and learn about PIC-type systems, and I
run Linux on my PC.

Is there a cheap system with a PIC or similar micro:
- with analogue & digital I/O, timers, PWM outputs and other goodies
- which hooks up to a PC via serial, parallel, USB or ethernet
- can be programmed from the PC e.g. into flash
- with open-source tools for writing & loading code & interfacing to it?

If you want open-source tools, you might want to look at an AVR-based
board rather than a PIC. There's a port of GCC for the AVR which is
very popular and well supported, so there's plenty of example code out
there. On Windows the port is called WinAVR, but it's just GCC,
binutils and a few other tools bundled up. If you do any Linux C
development, writing in C for an AVR will be very familiar.

I can't recommend a specific 'avr development board' (that's the magic
phrase you need to plug in to a search engine), but finding one with
the features you want won't be hard - it's mostly built-in to the chip
itself. A typical development board is just a voltage regulator,
crystal, RS232 level-shifter (so you can hook the AVR's logic-level
UART to your PC's RS232 level UART), connectors and perhaps a few
buttons and LEDs - plus the chip itself of course. You can just buy
the chip(s) and roll your own on a solderless breadboard if you
prefer.

In addition to the development board, you'll need a 'programmer'. This
attaches to your PC and to the ISP (In-System Programming) header on
the board and lets you reprogram the flash in the AVR. You can also
have a software 'bootloader' running on the AVR, so you can update
your programs over RS232 without using the dedicated programmer. You
still need the programmer to program the bootloader in the first place
though. Programmers can be as simple as a few discrete components
connected to your parallel port (there are many designs available on
the web), or a commercial unit connected via RS232 or USB.

The first Google UK hit (how lazy am I?) finds something which could
well be suitable, the ATmega32 Development Board and AVR ISP
Downloader (they mean programmer) here:

http://www.active-robots.com/products/controllr/active-boards.shtml

Any particular reason for sending all followups to a group to which
you didn't send the original message?


Tim
--
Did I really still have that sig?
.

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