Best battery for the micro projects.

[bloody-orc]

actually in real life applications i have seen more atmel chips than pics; but this is not the topic here . i tested the chips when they were reading ACD and displaying data to LCD as vast as possible and atmel seemed to do the job faster. of cource those 18F chips are better, newer etc, but atmel has a 32bit microController, that can run linux. does pic have something like that?

 

[dknguyen]

Atmel

Aha, but the Atmel 32-bit DSP does not have a built-in ADC while the 16-bit DSPic does!

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

actually in real life applications i have seen more atmel chips than pics; but this is not the topic here . i tested the chips when they were reading ACD and displaying data to LCD as vast as possible and atmel seemed to do the job faster.

If you've seen more AVR's than PIC's you're not looking in the right places

The test you mentioned is going to run SLOW on both devices, neither will run any faster than the other (unless one is particularly badly written?). They will both be limited by the speed of the LCD to a tiny fraction of the speed they are capable of.

In fact, having done such programs on a PIC, I would say that BOTH will be deliberately limited to even slower than the LCD?, otherwise you can't read the LCD as it changes too fast - even though it's incredibly slow in PIC or AVR terms.

 

[philba]

yaw... we can debate precise features but eesti metz (bloody orc) has it right. a real world test is the only reasonable kind. Head-to-head, best implimentations of a given application. you can debate the validity of the specific test, of course.

I use PICs more frequently because of their wide feature set, cost effectiveness and my investment in tools. If I was doing a critical battery application though, I'd look at AVRs or MSP430s.

 

[bloody-orc]

but can you connect a big cumputer LCD to that 16 bit thingy? and how many times have you seen a PDA or nintendo with an analog input? anyway lets cut this crap this isn't what the thread holder wants to know. if you want to discuss that further make a topic in **** chat.

 

[mramos1]

Well, I must tell you I prefer the AVR myself. They are faster, memory access is not paged, but I am not up on the new PIC changes. But I will be soon.

Like Philba said.. I have the eqipment for both. I just do more on the AVRs, once I did AVR I never looked back at the PIC.

But I bought some Tiny11 chips (old chip, but the price and size was the reason) and could not get Atmel support to get back to me on my expensive ATMEL programmer. So because of that and no phone number to call and talk to a person (to ask why it is not working, your chip, your programmer). My thought was back to PICS (and I do see a lot of PIC projects).. To my surprise, they (Microchip) has added a lot of the things AVR had that made me switch to AVR (and the price is not that much higher now).

So I will be checking PIC and AVR when I do a project now.

They are both good chips. Just avoid the Tiny11...

 

[philba]

I hear you on the debug-wire thing. 300 bucks for the programmer utterly sucks. worse yet, few engineers are going to buy it and sneak it past Purchasing like they did for PIC programmers. Not only that, Atmel won't release the debug-wire specs so no 3rd party clones. I have not taken the leap on the Tinys because of that. Just one of the reasons atmel will never be number one.

 

[mramos1]

Wow. electrotech dropped off the internet for a minute or two..

Philba:

I hate to say it, but you are right. AVRs have (or maybe had) the better parts, but they have no clue. That is why I said, Microchip, I am back.

No support, I imagine they got a ton of calls and have a special number, but I have never called anyone there and now I need help and they are not there for me. Guess I did not buy enough parts to get the special number. Even a response to my EMAIL to say we can not help you would have been nice.

My thoughts...

AVR ASM is a little more work than the PIC. But price, features and speed they have (or maybe had). And a friend of mine wrote a little basic compiler that I get for free, so simple jobs take longer to wire than write the code. So it was all good.

PIC ASM is not that bad really... Their parts have come down in price, and it looks like the have added all the features. And they are fast enough.

I think Atmel makes a lot of big sales, and the smaller guys are not a priority for them. I see ATMEL only in commercial products.

But when I did used the PIC chips I never had a problem (long as you put a resistor on RST and decouple well). And I learned that real fast. And this is from a guy that has tubes of 16F84.. Things might have changed.

I am still waiting on my PIC compiler to show in the mail (looks like next week now, and a holiday here in the States Monday). And EMAILed glitchbuster, no response by tomorrow, back to mouser.com.

 

[DirtyLude]

If number of microcontrollers in production is an indication of how good a uC is, then I suggest Nigel should move to Motorola processors as they by far beat out any other.

I think the Atmel controller running Linux being refered to is the Atmel ARM7 or ARM9 chip? Technically its just an ARM chip with an Atmel flavour, but they do have ADC's.

AVR's and PIC's both blow.

To be on topic. Voltage has a direct corrolation with power use. I know AVR's have low voltage versions.

 

[mramos1]

Some of you laugh at my old chips. The HC11 rocks ("rox" for the younger crowd), the 6800 is very easy to program (let me guess, never heard of them). 68xxx chips were great... Ask Apple.

BUT, all the moto chips now seem to be in cellphones. Maybe I should buy some stock? Well maybe not as the Boynton Beach plant was tore down a year or so ago (big new building)... And before all the hurricanes here.

All the moto phones I do are Sun/Java (sortta like doing Windows programming)... But they are into walkie-talkies, etc... But they are like Seimens. They will be here in the long run.

I will stick with AVR and PIC for what I do.

But good point.

 

[DirtyLude]

I will stick with AVR and PIC for what I do.

But good point.

In case it was missed, I was kidding. Big volume manufacturers have different requirements from a microcontroller than hobbyists or small valume producers. Many still use ancient chips like you do simple because they work, they have the production ability for them, and they are proven technology.

but, PIC's and AVR's still both blow. Zilog rocks. (R0Xors for you young people)