Gone are the days when there were less than a handful of micro controller's to choose from. The fact is, choosing a controller for a new product is quite a daunting task and is way beyond the scope of this article, but will be covered in more detail in a future article.
However choosing a microcontroller to 'play with' for your first project, is a little easier and the tools (both hardware and software?) these days, are extremely cheap, if not, free!....
In the past, emulators, programmers etc use to cost thousands of dollars (what were they thinking?). Now it is possible to get very low cost development tools.
10 years back I chose to go with Microchip. Why?, well the fact that they provided not only a free development environment (MPLAB IDE), but also tons of support through the forums and application notes on their website.
At that time my simple project was essentially an electronic switch. So starting withsuch a simple task, almost any micro would do the job.
I picked one of their low end PIC12xxx series of micro's. These little babies had around 512 bytes of OTP (One Time Programmable) ROM and around 25 bytes of RAM! (can it run WinXP?...I don't think so!!!). This was plenty for what I had in mind though.
Today there are many more vendors (TI, Atmel etc) which provide similar devices and excellent support too.
One of the relatively new 'players' that stand out from the crowd, is Cypress' mixed signal PSoC series of micro controllers. These devices are extremely flexible from the point of view of re configurable hardware. The other big plus with these devices is the capability, using their free tool (PSoC Designer now incorporating PSoC Express) to program their micro controllers without writing a single piece of code!...more on these in another article.
So if you are just getting started in this fascinating area, keep it simple and start with a lower end micro. Most of the vendors provide samples for free from their websites listed below.
- TI - Texas Instruments
- Microchip Inc
- Cypress
There are many many more, but these have been the main players I have been interested in.
If you have any good micro controller recommendations or related, please leave a comment.
Cheers.
Dale is a design expert in the field of electronics and imparts over 20 years of knowledge gained from 'hands on' experience in the industry. Find articles like this and more at his respectful site online at http://www.allthingsembedded.com
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