Electronic Circuits and Projects Forum

i am just starting out learning electronics with the eventual goal of being able to design and build thermostats and other equipment for our rare breed chicken farm, at the mo i am getting together equipment and components, as well as learning therory. It has become apparent that in order to reach our end goal then at some point i am going to have to get to grips with pics!!
this is where the problem is............ having read the sticky on this forum and digging around for many hours on the net and on here i am now totaly lost as to wich proggramer etc it would be best to get, i dont want something that i find will outgrow my eventual needs nor do i want something that has a learning curve so steep it puts me off. i would also like one that would be able to handle proggraming a reasonable range of chips in both terms of there size and capabillity. my preff at this stage would be something that would also give me the option to begin in a language resembaling BASIC, with a view to moving onto a more powerful language at a later stage. all this i need to achieve by the end of feb/ beginning march any help thoughts on the best controller etc for my needs or any help picking one would be appreciated. i have a budget of approx £60-£70 although if i was able to get something that matched what i wanted perfectly then i would find the extra cash (there gors the wifes birthday present )

excuse my ignorance but what is epe??

thanks i have vague recolections of the mag back in the 80'3!! shame its only online now .
what is the opinions on picaxe??

Ghost,

check out my tutorials at:

AVR programmer:
Atmel AVR ATmega16 / ATmega32 Programmer - Cheap Parallel Port Programmer

As for programming (I only do C for AVRs - assembler
has been done back in the 80s and 90s when I worked on
8031/8032 etc.) just google - C is rather easy.
For some simple starters visit eg.:
Atmel ATmega (ATmega16 / ATmega32) Serial Port Example Schematic and C program

Having that said, you're able to build a programmer and
a simple development board with much less than your
70 pounds estimated.

Cheers!

full control and future scaleabillity mater to me. whats the main diff between the diff types of chips and why do pics seem more popular?

Originally Posted by be80be

If you want to get up and running fast it would make a chip to learn with.
But you can do the same with a pic but it cost a little more up front but in the long run you'll save more. And you have full control.

be80be,

"up and running fast", yes, agreed, my solution might not
be the best for beginners, but on the long run I found that
the AVR solution with the el-cheapo programmer,
programmable with GCC on LINUX is (at least my) way to go
as that is a cheap solution (hardware and free software wise).

Cheers!

Originally Posted by ghostman11

full control and future scaleabillity mater to me. whats the main diff between the diff types of chips and why do pics seem more popular?

Ghost,

I too see some bias for a certain type of uCs for people...
As for me, for other chips e.g. for analog stuff, I prefer
AD and Maxim.

For all: I prefer OSS (open source software) and since
the GNU C compiler is available on Solaris, Windows,
Linux and this compiler supports the AVRs, I just love that :-)

Cheers! :-)