most popular microcontroller?

hey everyone,

I am thinking of abandoning my breadboard trainer project as it has become trivial. I can buy a chip to do everything I was planning on engineering (function generation, voltage regulation, h-bridge, ect)

so, if I abandon that project, I want to do something else. since I have had one class on microcontrollers (using the Motorola 68hc11, old, I know) I would like to mess around with them. maybe make a remote control car, or something.

so, I figured that if I mess around with micro controllers, I may as well use one that I may some day use as an EE. which leads me to my question: what is the most popular microcontroller?

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thanks,
Cato

 

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Good question. I have a feeling if you ask 50 people, you'll get 50 different answers, with all of them claiming theirs is definitely best and most popular. As for me, I'm a PIC fan. They have dozens of models with different pin compatibilities, different I/O schemes, and some decent clock rates too. They're not really well suited for any real processessing, but as the name implies they make damn good controllers.

-AntonK

 

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Microchip also supplies free tools (MPLAB) and has a nice cheap programmer you can get from DigiKey. As Anton says - they make damn good controllers for smaller embedded applications.

 

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yeah, I was thinking PIC, but not really sure. also, do you know of any emulators for them? I have an emulator for the 68hc11 on my laptop, so I can write code, load it into the virtual ram of the virtual 68hc11 board, and display the signals on any of the pins I choose. it would be nice to have the same thing for whatever microcontroller I decide to use.

 

or do you think I should mess around with the 68hc11 more, since I have another microcontroller class in the fall, and we will probably use the 68hc11

 

The MPLAB software available from Microchip.com for free has a simulator component. You can set watches.... step through code... present artificial stimulai on the various input pins.. etc... etc...

The pic ranges are a little old but by no means obsolete. Microchip now produce dsp microcontrollers too.

I found the PICDEM2 project board extremely useful in learning to program PIC18's.

Advantages of Pics:

• Many on-board periferals such as: system clock, ADC, EEPROM, timers, PWM and comparators.
• VERY cheap
• Easily available
• Easy to use
• Very small models available (Less than 1mm height, although the DIPs you'll use to practice are normal DIP size)

Disadvantages:

• No inbuilt FPU (but they can do IEEE floating point, all the C compilers know the algorithms)
• Not much RAM (can use external though)
• Slow (40MHz for the 18 range, 20MHz for the 16... more than enough speed for basic control aplications though)

 

Yep. But being a RISC machine, suprisingly fast given the clock speeds, especially if you're used to CISC machines.

 

how much ram can I put in the PICDEM2. how much is on the chip for that matter (pic18)?

 

A simple PIC micro controller unit is about £2 / €3. A PIC18 can be about twice that if you want the top end. The DSP chips are twice again for the top-of-the range model. However, you rarely need the top model. So chip cost is not an issue.

A PICDEM2 starter kit comes at about £60 or so. If you're happy spending around £100 to get some good understanding then go for something like that. If you are cheap like me, buy or make a simple programmer. I have a £20 Velleman programmmer / experiment board.

Extra memory? You can add as much as you like so long as you can design the interface. Simple PICs are 8bit native, but it's easy to make them work memory chips of higher bit counter / address (think multiplexers and latches).

You can interface whatever you like with the PICDEM2 board so long as it has CMOS or TTL interface (e.g. 5V = H, 0V = L or close enough) . At uni I have personally used stepper motors and LCDs with the PICDEM2 board with a PIC18F chip in it. To connect hardware to the outputs you use transisters or power MOSFETs obviously.

I hope I have not made this sound too hardcore - it's simple stuff once you've got it working once.

 

does the Velleman K8048 come with memory on it, or will I have to add it? what is the alrgest number of pins you can get on it? 28?

 

how about this? dose it look good?
http://www.vellemanusa.com/us/enu/product/view/?id=522869
the one you were talking about, as for as I can tell, only did pic16. whereas this one does pic18 as well.

 

BASIC Stamp:

http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/products/basicstamps/basic_stamps_about.asp

 

I don't know BASIC, I only know C and C++. is it possible to use it with C?

 

I looked it up. it seems you can use C =].

I think I may bid on this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/BS2-Parallax-ba...2QQihZ010QQcategoryZ50915QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
does that seem like a good choice to you guys? I mostly want to do little simple wheeled robots (at first anyway). I may work up the courage to put IR TX/RX so I can make my little robots see walls. I have already done that on the schools robots, but they were assembled by people who knew more about what they were doing =].

here are some specs:
http://www.warburtech.com/basic.stamps/basic.stamp.bs2-ic/

 

I don't think anyone mentioned Mikroelektronika. I found their free book excellent for a beginner. They have development systems and compilers (including C). You can even download the free version. If I had more time to pick up PIC MCU again as a hobby, I would definetly buy the EasyPIC 3 board.

 

BASIC Stamp sucks. Their expensive and limitted. There is a vast array of cheap flash PICS which are easy to learn and program. And because PICs are so inexpensive, you don't have to worry about frying them during testing.

 

what do you recomend?

 

The EasyPIC3, from dsdsds' link looks superb.

No PIC experiment board I have heard of comes with extra memory - but don't get hung up over mem, you won't need more than what's on the PIC anyway unless you are doing some serious data capture.

The Vellemen link you posted looks quite cool as a programmer for a limited range of components. I bought the K8048 because it was cheap and although it can only handle some of the 12F and 16F range that is all I wanted at that point.

The 14-bit PIC range (12F6XX and all 16F) only has 35 simple instructions, so I thought K8048 was a good place to start. (edit: that's 14 bit per instruction, PIC chips use a seperate array of 8-bit slots for RAM/registers)

My next step, personally, will be to get/build an ICD2 debugger. With one of these you can use MPLAB to program any MCU from Microchip that supports in-circuit serial programming (i.e. 99%). I'll then build my projects from scratch rather than develop on an experiment board.

 

yeah, I think I am going to get one of these:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Search.aspx?criteria=N36AC&DOY=10m7
compared to the 68HC11E9 I am used to, it rocks. moreover, it is quite cheap. I will probably get a cheap RC car from walmart and stick it on.

 

what do you guys think of this?
http://www.olimex.com/dev/
worth $25?