anybody mess with microcontrollers?
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I messed with rabbit microcontrollers... they support ethernet, bluetooth etc... http://www.rabbit.com/[^]
A dogged, arrogant belief in self and the childlike idealism that comes with not knowing my limits. This is my greatest blessing, my priceless attribute.
Good grief. I just don't understand why there are so many kinds of these things... :)
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So so far, 2 PIC guys, a TI guy (never heard of that microcontroller - no surprise), and an AVR guy. My reasoning for picking AVR Butterfly (based on ATMega168) is that there's that avrfreaks.net site which is a big populated forum almost codeproject-esque. Nothing to do with the merits of the chip, I've just heard it praised a lot. Nobody's tried the Propeller yet tho...? It's company made that "basic stamp" (anybody know what "stamp" refers to??) And it runs an interpretted language or asm and recently got a c compiler. Not sure if it's free. So I don't like the idea of a chip running an interpretted language X| Anyways, we'll see how this atmega thing is. The chip has a TON of fans and books about it and support up the wazoo so that's why I picked it. But that propellor has 8 cores and might run faster and such. So so far I'm gonna just dive into that butterfly thing and keep readin on the other options as i go. It's pretty cool what these things can do now adays. And a whole os in z80?? Yikes! I remember using z80 on the timex sinclair ZX81 I had. With it's awesome tape drive and "fast mode" (turning off the video interface to speed the cpu). Anyways, I guess microcontrollers aren't as rare a hobby as I thought. There sure are a FREAKIN LOT of em. It's just like the old days. Should I get a Vic20, a ZX81, an Apple2? Or go for that AWESOME c64?? (But with more to choose from) ...Steve
Steve Hazel wrote:
And a whole os in z80?? Yikes!
Yep, believe it or not, I had a basic TRS-80 Model 1 and got friggin tired of it's Basic OS, so I decided to write my own for fun. I had no extra cash at the time, so I wrote a rudimentary Z80 assembler in Basic and POKED machine code into memory to bootstrap the process, then used that to write a Forth-like OS. I built a diskette interface and wrote the "driver" in Forth, and also built a modem that screamed along at a whole 300 baud. I programmed some stuff to use the cassette interface as a simple ADC and DAC. Once I got the OS working, I burned it into a ROM and installed a switch so I could boot to the original Basic OS or my own OS. Mine was many times faster than the original. That was all fun, but I think I like my laptop better ...
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Steve Hazel wrote:
And a whole os in z80?? Yikes!
Yep, believe it or not, I had a basic TRS-80 Model 1 and got friggin tired of it's Basic OS, so I decided to write my own for fun. I had no extra cash at the time, so I wrote a rudimentary Z80 assembler in Basic and POKED machine code into memory to bootstrap the process, then used that to write a Forth-like OS. I built a diskette interface and wrote the "driver" in Forth, and also built a modem that screamed along at a whole 300 baud. I programmed some stuff to use the cassette interface as a simple ADC and DAC. Once I got the OS working, I burned it into a ROM and installed a switch so I could boot to the original Basic OS or my own OS. Mine was many times faster than the original. That was all fun, but I think I like my laptop better ...
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
Hmmm, forth like OS, eh? I remember a little of forth. All that RPN stack stuff. (And that dreaded dictionary!) Very cool lightweight language. I don't think I'd want to write huge systems in it, but for hobby stuff and hardware control, that'd be a great language. Buuuut, I'll stick with C :) And, by the way, that makes you the heaviest duty programmer I've come across. (Not sure if that's a compliment or a curse) ...Steve
modified on Monday, November 17, 2008 8:48 PM
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So so far, 2 PIC guys, a TI guy (never heard of that microcontroller - no surprise), and an AVR guy. My reasoning for picking AVR Butterfly (based on ATMega168) is that there's that avrfreaks.net site which is a big populated forum almost codeproject-esque. Nothing to do with the merits of the chip, I've just heard it praised a lot. Nobody's tried the Propeller yet tho...? It's company made that "basic stamp" (anybody know what "stamp" refers to??) And it runs an interpretted language or asm and recently got a c compiler. Not sure if it's free. So I don't like the idea of a chip running an interpretted language X| Anyways, we'll see how this atmega thing is. The chip has a TON of fans and books about it and support up the wazoo so that's why I picked it. But that propellor has 8 cores and might run faster and such. So so far I'm gonna just dive into that butterfly thing and keep readin on the other options as i go. It's pretty cool what these things can do now adays. And a whole os in z80?? Yikes! I remember using z80 on the timex sinclair ZX81 I had. With it's awesome tape drive and "fast mode" (turning off the video interface to speed the cpu). Anyways, I guess microcontrollers aren't as rare a hobby as I thought. There sure are a FREAKIN LOT of em. It's just like the old days. Should I get a Vic20, a ZX81, an Apple2? Or go for that AWESOME c64?? (But with more to choose from) ...Steve
I think the PIC's popularity is mostly due to its age. The PIC has been around for a very long time. I looked a bit into the PIC and imho the architecture is just plain odd and archaic. But you do get the advantage of lots of existing resources and a larger selection of devices. Still, I think the AVR is very easy to get into and nice to work with.
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I think the PIC's popularity is mostly due to its age. The PIC has been around for a very long time. I looked a bit into the PIC and imho the architecture is just plain odd and archaic. But you do get the advantage of lots of existing resources and a larger selection of devices. Still, I think the AVR is very easy to get into and nice to work with.
Ok, THAT's the kinda tip I'm lookin' for :) Thanks very much, ...Steve fyi - my pc past - http://shazware.com/me/pcPast.html[^] long, but it brings a lotta programmers down memory lane...
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I'm trying to get back to the simplicity of asm on my c64. And microcontrollers seem pretty powerful now adays. Anybody else already have this hobby? Seems like there are a LOT of options. ATMega168, Propeller, and apparently a ton of others. I'm gonna dive in with that AVR Butterfly thingy (based on ATMega168 or whatever). There's also that Arduino thing and such. If anybody has already taken the plunge, hearing which direction you went and what you're doin' with it would be most helpful :) Thanks, ...Steve
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Seriously considered it for all the reasons you mentioned every year for at least the last decade and never got around to it.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
Heheh. Well, I ordered the kit. That's a start... I'm not necessarily gonna build anything fancy at all. Just wanna see some blinkin' LEDs from a c program running on a little chip. That won't be too hard. (He says not having done it.) If I can make it to the robot stage, that'd be great. Buuut, that's kinda a lotta hardware. And those things' hardware is kinda spendy... goal #1 is just to get some lights blinkin in a way that a simple clock/counter circuit couldn't do it. Actually, goal #1 was just buy the kit :) Actually, goal #1 was getting a subscription to nuts&volts magazine :) So I'm already workin on goal #3! Sweeet. (I should add that my contract's up Dec 1, my main hobby project (a midi sequencer) is getting stable-ish, my kids are gettin old, and the kit's only a hundred bucks)
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I'm trying to get back to the simplicity of asm on my c64. And microcontrollers seem pretty powerful now adays. Anybody else already have this hobby? Seems like there are a LOT of options. ATMega168, Propeller, and apparently a ton of others. I'm gonna dive in with that AVR Butterfly thingy (based on ATMega168 or whatever). There's also that Arduino thing and such. If anybody has already taken the plunge, hearing which direction you went and what you're doin' with it would be most helpful :) Thanks, ...Steve
Steve Hazel wrote:
Anybody else already have this hobby?
Taking a degree in it if that counts? ;P I haven't personally played with the Atmels but having looked at the programming environment it's much nicer than the PICs. From what I've gathered the AVRs are nicer to program etc, however the programming hardware (beyond anything simple) from what I remember begins to get a bit expensive. Where as the PICs stay nice and cheap. The other Micro's I've played with are:
- AVR NGW100[^] - Really simple to get up and running, runs Linux with HTTP, FTP, Telnet etc
- Variants of M16[^] - Now these chips are ridiculous, the one I played with in the past had 8 RS232 ports, 80 GPIO (General Purpose I/O) pins, 16 16-bit timers, 16 24-bit ADC/DAC and could run on under 15mW of power if configured properly. All in a cm² package, one of the nice things is that unlike more complicated chips the whole thing can be reprogrammed using a few pins (3 I think) via a serial port. Even if you completely screw it up there's a default mode which will allow you to reprogram it through the serial-port. Not like the NGW100 where you require a £2000 programmer if you mess up the boot-loader.
Depends on what you want to be doing with it really, the smaller chips are cheaper however sometimes they're a false economy and more hassle than their worth. There is a free GNU based C compiler available for the M16 and M32 (KPIT or something like that) and all you really require to get started with that is a PC, a serial port (tough at the moment), a few wires and a power-supply. Of course if you wanted LCDs etc you'd have to read up or Google how to wire them in unless you want to pay a bit more for a development kit. The chips themselves are about £7 from what I remember, but then these are capable of controlling a system which is sampling 512 channels at 5kHz continuously and consuming well under 1W of power.
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Steve Hazel wrote:
And a whole os in z80?? Yikes!
Yep, believe it or not, I had a basic TRS-80 Model 1 and got friggin tired of it's Basic OS, so I decided to write my own for fun. I had no extra cash at the time, so I wrote a rudimentary Z80 assembler in Basic and POKED machine code into memory to bootstrap the process, then used that to write a Forth-like OS. I built a diskette interface and wrote the "driver" in Forth, and also built a modem that screamed along at a whole 300 baud. I programmed some stuff to use the cassette interface as a simple ADC and DAC. Once I got the OS working, I burned it into a ROM and installed a switch so I could boot to the original Basic OS or my own OS. Mine was many times faster than the original. That was all fun, but I think I like my laptop better ...
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
I too wrote a Z80 Forth back in the day. I used a Memotech MTX512, which I still have though sadly the tape with the code (assembler) has gone to the great dump in the sky. I also still have my Sinclair QL. It seems that I cannot throw anything away at least not deliberately. I even found three boxes of 10 Dysan 51/4 96tpi floppy disks unused and one still has the cellophane wrapping intact.
Henry Minute If you open a can of worms, any valid solution *MUST* involve a larger can!
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I'm trying to get back to the simplicity of asm on my c64. And microcontrollers seem pretty powerful now adays. Anybody else already have this hobby? Seems like there are a LOT of options. ATMega168, Propeller, and apparently a ton of others. I'm gonna dive in with that AVR Butterfly thingy (based on ATMega168 or whatever). There's also that Arduino thing and such. If anybody has already taken the plunge, hearing which direction you went and what you're doin' with it would be most helpful :) Thanks, ...Steve
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Steve Hazel wrote:
Anybody else already have this hobby?
Taking a degree in it if that counts? ;P I haven't personally played with the Atmels but having looked at the programming environment it's much nicer than the PICs. From what I've gathered the AVRs are nicer to program etc, however the programming hardware (beyond anything simple) from what I remember begins to get a bit expensive. Where as the PICs stay nice and cheap. The other Micro's I've played with are:
- AVR NGW100[^] - Really simple to get up and running, runs Linux with HTTP, FTP, Telnet etc
- Variants of M16[^] - Now these chips are ridiculous, the one I played with in the past had 8 RS232 ports, 80 GPIO (General Purpose I/O) pins, 16 16-bit timers, 16 24-bit ADC/DAC and could run on under 15mW of power if configured properly. All in a cm² package, one of the nice things is that unlike more complicated chips the whole thing can be reprogrammed using a few pins (3 I think) via a serial port. Even if you completely screw it up there's a default mode which will allow you to reprogram it through the serial-port. Not like the NGW100 where you require a £2000 programmer if you mess up the boot-loader.
Depends on what you want to be doing with it really, the smaller chips are cheaper however sometimes they're a false economy and more hassle than their worth. There is a free GNU based C compiler available for the M16 and M32 (KPIT or something like that) and all you really require to get started with that is a PC, a serial port (tough at the moment), a few wires and a power-supply. Of course if you wanted LCDs etc you'd have to read up or Google how to wire them in unless you want to pay a bit more for a development kit. The chips themselves are about £7 from what I remember, but then these are capable of controlling a system which is sampling 512 channels at 5kHz continuously and consuming well under 1W of power.
For absolutely basic, no frills and not much timing constrains uC, I use Parallax Basic Stamp. PIC based, programmed using BASIC syntax and ready to go. Not the fastest and latest technology but well supported by applications and user group. Cheers Vaclav
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I too wrote a Z80 Forth back in the day. I used a Memotech MTX512, which I still have though sadly the tape with the code (assembler) has gone to the great dump in the sky. I also still have my Sinclair QL. It seems that I cannot throw anything away at least not deliberately. I even found three boxes of 10 Dysan 51/4 96tpi floppy disks unused and one still has the cellophane wrapping intact.
Henry Minute If you open a can of worms, any valid solution *MUST* involve a larger can!
Careful there, Henry. Unless we were still in diapers when writing Z80 Forth, we're going to start showing our age here ...
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Steve Hazel wrote:
Anybody else already have this hobby?
Taking a degree in it if that counts? ;P I haven't personally played with the Atmels but having looked at the programming environment it's much nicer than the PICs. From what I've gathered the AVRs are nicer to program etc, however the programming hardware (beyond anything simple) from what I remember begins to get a bit expensive. Where as the PICs stay nice and cheap. The other Micro's I've played with are:
- AVR NGW100[^] - Really simple to get up and running, runs Linux with HTTP, FTP, Telnet etc
- Variants of M16[^] - Now these chips are ridiculous, the one I played with in the past had 8 RS232 ports, 80 GPIO (General Purpose I/O) pins, 16 16-bit timers, 16 24-bit ADC/DAC and could run on under 15mW of power if configured properly. All in a cm² package, one of the nice things is that unlike more complicated chips the whole thing can be reprogrammed using a few pins (3 I think) via a serial port. Even if you completely screw it up there's a default mode which will allow you to reprogram it through the serial-port. Not like the NGW100 where you require a £2000 programmer if you mess up the boot-loader.
Depends on what you want to be doing with it really, the smaller chips are cheaper however sometimes they're a false economy and more hassle than their worth. There is a free GNU based C compiler available for the M16 and M32 (KPIT or something like that) and all you really require to get started with that is a PC, a serial port (tough at the moment), a few wires and a power-supply. Of course if you wanted LCDs etc you'd have to read up or Google how to wire them in unless you want to pay a bit more for a development kit. The chips themselves are about £7 from what I remember, but then these are capable of controlling a system which is sampling 512 channels at 5kHz continuously and consuming well under 1W of power.
Hmm, your 2 links point to the same place. Isn't Atmel just the company that makes the ATMega series of chips? I'm pretty sure the AVR boards have Atmel processors on em...? The AVR butterfly is an (oops not a 168) ATMega169 chip with an lcd and a buncha other stuff already glued together (soldered, whatever). Here's some specs for it... http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc4271.pdf[^] This is the kit I'm gettin'... http://www.smileymicros.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=11[^] Man. That "thing" you linked to has a TON of stuff on it. It's a full scale linux os, eh? With a ton of i/o. There's also that Arduino board... http://www.arduino.cc/[^] And the Propeller chip looks cool too... http://www.parallax.com/tabid/407/Default.aspx[^] As I say, how does ANYbody make heads or tails outa this stuff...?? And good lord. I am SO done googlin'... I'll see what this avr butterfly thing gets me and read up on "the best chip ever" later... Kinda like I bought that TimexSinclair ZX81 and THEN found my beloved c64 :) ...Steve http://shazware.com[^]
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I'm trying to get back to the simplicity of asm on my c64. And microcontrollers seem pretty powerful now adays. Anybody else already have this hobby? Seems like there are a LOT of options. ATMega168, Propeller, and apparently a ton of others. I'm gonna dive in with that AVR Butterfly thingy (based on ATMega168 or whatever). There's also that Arduino thing and such. If anybody has already taken the plunge, hearing which direction you went and what you're doin' with it would be most helpful :) Thanks, ...Steve
Steve Hazel wrote:
I'm trying to get back to the simplicity of asm on my c64.
I loved my old C64 (first computer was a VIC-20) and the 6502 asm. The PLA (IIRC was the name of the inteface chip) was easy to work with for interfacing with the external world. Used it several times for triggering a cash drawer not to mention other fun play (blow a few of the chips though in my play time ;) ).
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Keep on your toes – Process Monitor V2.02 Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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Hmm, your 2 links point to the same place. Isn't Atmel just the company that makes the ATMega series of chips? I'm pretty sure the AVR boards have Atmel processors on em...? The AVR butterfly is an (oops not a 168) ATMega169 chip with an lcd and a buncha other stuff already glued together (soldered, whatever). Here's some specs for it... http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc4271.pdf[^] This is the kit I'm gettin'... http://www.smileymicros.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=11[^] Man. That "thing" you linked to has a TON of stuff on it. It's a full scale linux os, eh? With a ton of i/o. There's also that Arduino board... http://www.arduino.cc/[^] And the Propeller chip looks cool too... http://www.parallax.com/tabid/407/Default.aspx[^] As I say, how does ANYbody make heads or tails outa this stuff...?? And good lord. I am SO done googlin'... I'll see what this avr butterfly thing gets me and read up on "the best chip ever" later... Kinda like I bought that TimexSinclair ZX81 and THEN found my beloved c64 :) ...Steve http://shazware.com[^]
Steve Hazel wrote:
Hmm, your 2 links point to the same place.
Silly copy & paste. Sorry about that.
Steve Hazel wrote:
As I say, how does ANYbody make heads or tails outa this stuff...??
Well that's where Renesas (used to be Mitsubishi Electronics & some other big company where they decided to create an off-shoot company called Renesas to deal with chips) comes into it's down. They've got a simple program which you download (no installation required from what I remember) and you simply pick the specs you want and it selects the chips which are best for you. Even has links to download all the relevant datasheets without having to find them. Now if only there was one for every micro...
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Careful there, Henry. Unless we were still in diapers when writing Z80 Forth, we're going to start showing our age here ...
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
Walt Fair, Jr. wrote:
Unless we were still in diapers
Of course I was?:-D
Henry Minute If you open a can of worms, any valid solution *MUST* involve a larger can!
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Walt Fair, Jr. wrote:
Unless we were still in diapers
Of course I was?:-D
Henry Minute If you open a can of worms, any valid solution *MUST* involve a larger can!