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I've used Atmel AVR Classic, Mega and Tiny for quite a few projects using the gnu toolchain. The free compiler is quite good and programming cables can be made

by cnvogel 17y ago

I've used Atmel AVR Classic, Mega and Tiny for quite a few projects using the gnu toolchain. The free compiler is quite good and programming cables can be made very cheap. To get more programming or debugging features you need a decent one though (DebugWire, high-voltage serial/parallel programming...). There's a windows distribution (winavr) that integrates well with the Atmel-provided AVR studio (but I never use that). They are fairly popular with the Arduino crowd that created their own variation of C which goes well with their own IDE. Internal functions are good (counters, sync/async serial ports, ADCs,...) but there are not many (e.g. only very few parts have two hardware async serial ports). I've not used PICs, but they are said to have a bigger variety of parts that have different built-in functions. So you might find a better suited part in that family. 68HCxx and 8051 is very old-school, you can probably buy the "best tested" compilers and IDEs for those. This can be an advantage if you are working in/for a very antiquated industry. On the other hand, you can get astounding high speed-parts (I think it's silabs that makes 8051 MCUs >100 MHz)... You forgot to mention the plethora of ARM-core MCUs which are made by several companies. Even if they come in many varieties, they are identical regarding tool-chain and programmer (they share the same JTAG logic). So this might be a good long-term investment. Also debugging via JTAG is very good. But being a 32bit architecture those MCUs are more often "high-end" parts (especially compared e.g. to 8-bit AVR tiny parts...). If you want a lot of computing power, that's possibly a good way to go.

joezydeco 17y ago
68xx and 8051 might be old-school, but you can also synthesize those cores inside an FPGA. That's pretty useful and avoids paying licensing fees for some of the newer stuff.
m_eiman 17y ago
I left out the ARMs since they appear to be a bit on the expensive side (the ones I'm looking at cost about $4 in not so large quantities), and the ones I looked at didn't have much in the way of UARTs, ADC and IOs. I'll have another look though; I found some cheaper ones with a quick search on digikey. As for the 8051 family, that's what I've been working with in the last two projects - and I'd like to find a better alternative. Both in terms of hardware (the number of page selectors needed to cram all those registers into 128/255 bytes of address space is just wrong) and software (I've used IAR and Keil, and neither feels like it's evolved too much since 2002).

by cnvogel 17y ago

joezydeco 17y ago

68xx and 8051 might be old-school, but you can also synthesize those cores inside an FPGA. That's pretty useful and avoids paying licensing fees for some of the newer stuff.

m_eiman 17y ago

I left out the ARMs since they appear to be a bit on the expensive side (the ones I'm looking at cost about $4 in not so large quantities), and the ones I looked at didn't have much in the way of UARTs, ADC and IOs. I'll have another look though; I found some cheaper ones with a quick search on digikey. As for the 8051 family, that's what I've been working with in the last two projects - and I'd like to find a better alternative. Both in terms of hardware (the number of page selectors needed to cram all those registers into 128/255 bytes of address space is just wrong) and software (I've used IAR and Keil, and neither feels like it's evolved too much since 2002).