Sim said:
is a micro controller like a pc chip that I program and can use it to print to an lcd screeN?
i did a google search for Zilogs Z8Encore and found no results. Could you give me a link to that kit?
You can buy the Z8e kit from
www.mouser.com or
www.digikey.com. I'm sure you can get the AVR kit from both of those as well.
I just started a few months ago with the Z8e kit and I love it. It comes with everything you need including the development board, the programmer and a nice C compiler/assembler and development environment included.
Yes, a microcontroller is like a little PC. It has ROM and RAM built into one chip and you can control each pin with either general purpose IO or specialized functions like UART, or IRDA, or Analog to Digital converter.
This is what I was talking about right here. This is a board I made up to house the ADXL202AE accelerometer. (Sorry the picture is so blurry, I took it fast and the board is very small) The accelerometer is the squarish thing in the bottom right. The black chip is a tiny SSOP 20 pin Z8e chip. The accelerometer has 2 outputs. It measure forces in 4 directions, so if I moved the board in any direction, except up and down, it will register the forces acting on it. So if I moved it 2 inches to the left, it would register the moving force and the stopping force, you could calculate the rate of movement and distance moved based on the force alone, which would allow you to make a mouse that needs no surface.
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I made this board for a racecar datalogger, which does exactly the same thing on a larger scale. I can take the force data taken from driving around the track and replot exactly where the car moved relative to it's starting position with that data alone.
5 or 6 months ago, I had just about zero knowledge of electronics. Watch out, cause it can get addictive. I wrote a small page, there's a short writeup on how to setup a 40pin Z8e chip on a broadboard with the programmer, when you get beyond the development kit. Also you can check out the z8Encore Yahoo mailing list.
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AVR and PIC are both more popular microcontrollers (the Zilog is brand new) and good choices as well. I haven't had any experience with the AVR, but I found the PIC to be too confusing and the mass of cheap flaky programmers and assembly language just turned me off. I still have some PIC chips and a couple old programmers lying around here.
Well, I've written a novel. I'll go away now.