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microcontroller advice for alarm

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fromansr

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Hi all

I need some advice on what microcontroller to use for an alarm/real time clock that records and plays sounds. I'm new to these, so I don't know where to start looking. I need 1 that is preferably suited to beginners, but can be interfaced to a substantial number of components (eg microphone, speaker etc.)

Any advice would be helpful.



Thanks
 
Thanks for the reply..I probably should have been more specific.

The project involves a multi alarm system with multi message voice recording/playback.

I'm thinking of using a ds1307 rtc with a (pic) microcontroller that has an ADC, which are plentiful as you said. So I'll probably need heaps of external memory (sd card/flash ram). Using these components (and DAC etc..), is it just a matter of coding to set up the multiple alarm system?

Sorry about the basic questions, but i dont want to waste money on the wrong components.

Also is it easier to program in C or assembly? (ive only used C in software programming!!)

Thanks to all those who reply.
 
SD cards use an SPI bus and are relatively easy to interface to a micro controller. Also SD cards prices have plummeted in recent years to the point where a large SD card to store .wav data is not going to be a problem. It's still relatively complex and would take a decent amount of time to put together and code though.

I would most definitly recommend programming in C, PIC is not particularly ASM friendly and you already know C syntax so learn it for a micro controller will be easier.

If you've never used a micro controller before I would recommend looking into both PIC (Microchip) and AVR (Atmel) micro controllers. PIC's are fine but AVR's has some advantages which are beyond the scope of this post =) regardless of what you use both will do the job. The Alarm system would probably be easiest to do, the hardest part is getting the SD card code to work and file access for the .wav data, there should be some C libraries out there for it but that's beyond me as I don't program PIC's.

Others here may be able to recommend specific sites for accessing SD cards using a PIC.
 
ok thanks....flash chips (with SPI) are an alternative, but not sure if programming is easier. Ill keep looking!
I've decided on the picf877 for pin size and availability...so that's probably all the help i need for now, unless anyone has some general hints :)
 
If you're going to be changing the messages on a regular basis file management is going to become a problem, you're not just looking for simple read/write code at that point you'll need to manage a FAT table and worry about fragmentation and all that fun stuff. Again don't know much about pics don't know if there are libraries for that out there in C. Should be if you dig enough.
 
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